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September 2009 | Volume 12 / Number 9
Product Review

Grandstream GXE5024 and GXE5028

Tom Keating

In today’s increasingly cost-conscious economy, SMBs are looking for feature-rich IP PBXs at the lowest cost. Many SMBs are willing to sacrifice some advanced telephony features to just get the basics, including call transfer, three-way conferencing, auto-attendant and voicemail. Advanced features, such as call queues or call recording, are nice features to have, but many SMBs aren’t willing to pay for higher-end IP PBXs with this functionality.

Fortunately, Grandstream’s GXE5024 and GXE5028 products not only have the basics, they also have some advanced functionality such as call queues – and at a reasonable price of just $899 for the GXE5024 and $1,399 for the GXE5028. Grandstream sent me a GXE5024 for a test drive.

First, the only difference between the GXE5024 and the GXE5028 is the number of analog PSTN FXO ports: four ports versus eight ports. They both also sport two FXS ports for connecting analog phones, fax machines, etc.

Hooking up the GXE5024 was a snap. What’s convenient is that it sports a PoE port on the LAN interface, so you can skip the use of the included AC adapter if you want. I logged into the default IP address, 192.168.10.1 for the GXE5024. It provides a quick set-up wizard, which is pre-configured with basic call settings that enable you to quickly configure your GXE.




I tried both the wizard and non-wizard method and both are pretty straightforward. From the Web interface, I clicked the Auto Provision link, which kicks off auto-detection of any Grandstream phones I connect to the same LAN segment. I simply had to select a “starting extension” and “ending extension” to set my extension range.

Next, I figured I’d try some third-party phones to see if the auto-provisioning worked with them as well. I attempted an Aastra 57i and a Polycom (News - Alert) IP-650 phone, but neither seemed to auto-provision. The phones did discover the TFTP boot server on the GXE5024, but they weren’t able to assign an extension or any SIP settings. Although the auto-provisioning didn’t work, I was able to manually add the phones with no trouble.

After configuring some extensions, the next step was adding some trunks. The GXE5024 supports four analog lines, so I configured it to use a four-port Teltone analog simulator very easily. In addition, I was able to assign extensions 790 and 791 to the two analog FXS ports, which can be used for analog phones and credit card or fax machines. I also configured a SIP trunk using one of the promotional trial SIP trunk providers built into the Grandstream auto-provisioning Web tool.

For unified messaging, it supports a voicemail-to-email feature with the ability to set the proper SMTP settings for proper email routing. Additionally, it also supports fax-to-email and can also automatically detect fax tones and route it to a user's fax mailbox.

The GXE502X supports two or four password protected conference bridges that allow up to 12 or 20 simultaneous participants from PSTN trunks, SIP trunks or internal extensions. You can dial the conference bridge extension to join, or even invite other participants by entering in their extension from the web interface. Administrators can also mute/unmute conference participants from the Web interface as well as kick them out.

Important to most SMBs is support for hunt/ring groups. The GXE502x series supports parallel ringing, as well as serial or round-robin ringing. Adding various auto-attendant menus such as business hours, after hours, and holidays was pretty straightforward. One of the most powerful features of the GXE502x is the ability to define call queues so calls are answered in the order they were received and assigned to agents with the best skills. Having advanced queues and skills-based routing in such a low-cost IP-PBX (News - Alert) is unheard of, so I tip my cap to Grandstream.

One really cool feature is that the GXE will allow admins to capture all the packet traffic coming in and out of either the LAN or WAN Ethernet interface of the GXE. This is very helpful to debug certain configuration issues and do SIP troubleshooting.

The GXE502x supports peering with other IP PBX systems. While this may not be critical for SMBs, as companies do grow, they can deploy multiple GXE502x devices if they so desire and have a unified extension dialing plan that routes calls over IP. Further, larger organizations might deploy the GXE502x at branch office locations and peer back to their main corporate headquarters’ IP PBX. IT

Tom Keating (News - Alert) is vice president, chief technology officer and executive technology editor/SEO director of Technology Marketing Corporation.

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