Israeli company AudioCodes offers a the Mediant line of enterprise session border controllers (E-SBC), presently available as appliances in the Mediant 9000, 4000, 2600, 1000, 800, 500 series editions.
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Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE)
ScoreĀ 8.3Ā outĀ ofĀ 10
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The Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) is a session border controller, which provides session control, security, interworking, and demarcation. CUBE is a software product available for licensing on the Cisco IOSĀ® and Cisco IOS XE Software which runs on Cisco enterprise routers, but is also available for licensing as a software load for a virtual container.
To be fair to CUBE and AudioCodes, my experience with AudioCodes was over 4 years ago, so their interfaces and CLI may have seen some revisions/updates. CUBE provides a unified CLI experience with the rest of your existing enterprise Cisco environment, whereas AudioCodes blend ā¦
The E-SBC works well in situations where you are working with multiple carriers and/or multiple phone systems and need to route either by IP, sender info or inbound phone numbers.
I find that companies that require faxing to go through the E-SBC seem to be a little less stable than competitor devices.
If you are in an environment that is primarily Cisco and switching from PRI circuits or other non-SIP circuits and are generally considered to be on an enterprise-grade platform, CUBE is likely a solid choice for you. From my experience, I cannot speak to the video handling that CUBE offers as we do not employ that, so hopefully other reviews will provide insight on that.
I believe the help files need to have more information about why certain options should be used rather than just a list of possible choices. Some choices obviously require a wealth of information or experience, but having just a bit more info in the help file would save research time.
I'd like to see a user side option to be able to ping and trace route testing without having to be in another admin interface.
The message log function is great for watching SIP packets stream but needs more options for pausing to capture when there are a lot of calls coming through.
In my opinion, the route tables & configurations for proxies and groups need some massaging. The normal config options could be placed on one screen and then have a choice to go to "extended" mode for less-used items. This would make implementation faster as there are so many options now that it can be hard to see the few that are needed for general configuration.
I would love to see a screen that would allow the formation of a "SIP Ladder" where you could enter a source and/or destination IP and have the gateway show you the communication rather than pouring through logs. This is something that various carriers and even Wireshark are doing now but it would be great to have this option from the gateway's perspective as it would make it easier to compare with the outside traffic diagrams without having a senior network tech having to help.
Syntax input should be easier to read and write. For I.E: voice, translations are similar to SED (Stream Editor). Sometimes regular expression is hard to understand for new users.
Virtual Cube software stability
Cube redundancy setup (defining control interfaces, tracks, setting thresholds and reloads). Redundancy setup should be an automated process, where a user can initiate a setup wizard and then just input key information such as the IP address of Cubes and the exclusive IP address, etc.
We previously used other SBC's but weren't satisfied with the performance. The support wasn't there and constant RMA's for defective hardware. Although the CUBE is expensive, it saves time and resources on support. Robust features and no downtime in 3 years. I don't believe many vendors offer products to compete in this space. You will regret to decision to go with cheaper SBC's.
Positive - My company has been able to retain business due to the low cost of the AudioCodes devices when compared to the other brands that some customers purchase through other vendors.
Positive - RMA is easy when it appears a card or module might be at issue, AudioCodes support is speedy to replace which grows customer confidence.
The ability to order, assemble, configure and ship multiple units to replace aged or failing gateways allowed us to impress the customer and gain more business.
The reliability of the devices with very lengthy up-time and little to no reboots has impressed customers greatly.