When I first spoke with Adtran in 2005, during VoiceCon, about their new planned IP-PBX and later met with them in the fall, I remember thinking that the battle to gain market share would be an uphill one for Adtran. When I reviewed the initial Netvanta 7100 offering a year later, I noted market differentiators in "Adtran Pushes the Convergence Window."
Adtran key differentiators of the 7100 are:
A few months ago, I sat down with Su Fleming of Adtran and we spent several hours going over the new release of the IPT 7100 and the new phone lineup. Since then, I spent more time between email exchanges and on the phone with the Product Manager, Samir Kakkar. In a respectable amount of time, Adtran has elevated the 7100 to a new level. Let me explain why I’m bullish about their recent release of the Netvanta 7100.
The 7100 is equipped with two 1-GIG ports for copper or fiber ports in addition to the 24-PoE ports (10/100 Mbps), power failure transfer, music-on-hold, paging, door relay; and the system uses compact flash, no hard drive. It supports 8 WiFi access points, ships with a default VLAN 1 for data and VLAN 2 for voice and two onboard 2500 ports.
The most interesting feature isn’t their new telephone handset lineup but instead the new software Adtran is equipping the 7100s with: VQM (Voice Quality Monitoring), a tool running along with Adtran’s Operating Software (AOS) to provide voice reports and metrics for troubleshooting and to avoid the cost of network assessments. VQM captures MOS, jitter, delay, and packet loss statistics that are necessary to troubleshoot VoIP calls over the WAN.
This tool could be just enough for many SMBs and I’ve harped on assessments, monitoring and reporting of metrics for IPT solutions for several years and made known that most SMBs can’t afford these tools. I also think that VQM is a value-added feature that empowers the dealer/interconnect while providing the factory (Adtran) with enough adequate information to resolve most common VoIP issues. Over the past several sessions of “Troubleshooting the IP-PBX,” at VoiceCon, we’ve speculated that these tools would one day be built into the IP-PBX platform in lieu of separate appliances, and Adtran made this a reality. VQM, I think, is the kind of tool needed for the SMB market and VQM will chip away at one significant barrier to entry – voice quality concerns.
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