They send all of their basic support to the evening group which only responds at night, so if you have to reply back it wont get to them for another 24 hours. And their first response doesn’t normally come for several days.

HORRIBLE product HORRIBLE support.

I’m with Kong I will never give digium another dollar. BTW I run an entire call center on Asterisk’s open source version and now believe even more that open source is the way to go.

Our solution to the problem has been to reboot the AA50 at the beginning of each day, but you have to make sure the unit is not writing voicemail or you will face file system corruption. There is a new version of firmware available on Digium’s beta site, but the release notes do not address this issue specifically; I am loathe to update the firmware and have other issues crop up.

At the end of the day, I would recommend using a compact computer equipped with a high efficiency power supply, whatever telephony card you need for analog service and a redundant (RAID1) disk setup to protect from disk failure. I have priced some units in recent months and you could build two units (one for standby in case of failure) for the cost of one AA50 with a year of support. If you are not well-versed in telephony solutions, I also recommend engaging an experienced party to help with all of the planning and implementation.

On a side note, you will want to check with Digium to ensure that the license is transferable to you if you buy used. Otherwise, you may end up with a unit that you cannot get support or updated software for, and at worst, can not legally use.

Best of luck in your search and integration!

These issues you bring up are pretty disconcerting, have you had any luck getting them resolved since posting this article? Has Digium released a firmware update for these issues? The company seems to be trying to get away from this product as fast as possible (another warning sign, it would seem). However, they might just be trying to push sales of the AA60, which appears to be a disk-based device at twice the price.

Any advice for a small office trying to get their feet wet with a low-impact / low-maintenance VoIP PBX?

Thank you for the kind reply.

I do now see the button to add more SIP/IAX trunks, even after I already have one trunk configured. I completely missed this previously for some reason (or maybe in an old firmware); thank you for the offer to help!

I think that Digium’s decision to make the “advanced options” hidden by default is a good call and I can see why things were done the way that they were. I interact with the advanced options regularly and three clicks was just a minor annoyance for me. For those of you reading this who are unfamiliar with the AA50 options, keep in mind that some of the advanced options offered therein are still somewhat experimental in the community at large and as such, not supported by Digium or seen as stable (rightfully so).

One giant gold star for Digium: The guys at Digium I have worked with thus far have been extremely supportive of the minor custom macros and changes that we made on our AA50 platform. Other lesser tech companies routinely put the blame on the customer who does anything evenly remotely out of the ordinary; I do not in any way feel that this is the case with Digium.

While waiting on the reboot issue to be identified and fixed, a simple reboot script based on Linux expect (“apt-get install expect” on Ubuntu) seems to be keeping us stabilized and I will be following up here with my script later today.

I look forward to catching up with you on IRC Ryan.

-Dennis