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Anyone here used or seen a CudaTel communication server?

I attended a vendor sponsored seminar on it a few months ago and it looks like a sweet box with a lots of functionality at a very low cost compared to others.

I would be interested in hearing some unbiased (aka non-vendor) comments about the CudaTel.

Thx,
TekMason

I wonder if its just another rebranded asterisk,judging from the screen shots it doesnt look very feature rich plus im not a big fan of sip to the desktop.

The core of the CudaTel system is based on FreeSWITCH. All of the rest of it is Barracuda's own code.
From what I saw it is very feature rich.
It is a pure IP solution and is SIP to the desktop with options for FXO/FXS, PRI etc.

FYI here is a good post by a former core Asterisk developer (now the main FreeSwitch developer) about why FreeSwitch is more reliable than Asterisk.
How does FreeSWITCH compare to Asterisk?
https://www.freeswitch.org/node/117

I am working on a Cudatel 270B right now. It is based on FreeSwitch. It works really well with Polycom, SNOM and Cisco phones. I am trying to make it work with Aastra phones. Not so easy. They work OK, but not at all easy. Buttons are an issue. You cannot have one button park for example. Nor can you have one button intercom unless you have a sidecar. It has a lot of features but no where near as many as a standard PBX. It has really good audio quality. Echo seems not to be an issue.

Hi PMCook,

Can you tell me what major features are missing on the CudaTel?

Have you contacted CudaTel support?
They were very proud of their North American support center at the seminar. I'm wondering how your experiences with them measure up to their sales job.

Tek, I am working closely with Cudatel. They are incorporating several changes to their next major revision that all came from my experience with the Aastra phones. Some include - one button park, intercom without a suffix code (*1), transfer to VM that does not include * codes, accesibilty to more system parameters from the GUI. They do not allow root access now.

There are some features missing such as the ability to centrally administer the VMS. You can administer any single message box by "impersonating" a user but you have no way to manage the whole thing at once or genrate reports. So if you have 200 users and your VM store is 99% full you have to login to each VM user to see what their message usage is. Hopefully user 200 is not using up all the space.

You cannot manage the phones from the GUI. You must manage each phone individually. You cannot easily push out a generalized CFG to phones.

You have no real call monitoring where you can actually watch the call progress. You have a general report of activity but it has no diagnostic detail.

Documentation is weak at this time but they have promised big changes to come.

Their support is very good. No complaints at all. They really do work closely with you to fix issues. Their techs are pretty knowledgable and actual engineers are available too.

They are adding more Aastra support but to get the most of the system for now, use Cisco, Polycom or SNOM phones.

Call quaility is great, echo cancellation is very good. They really shine in that department.

Thanks so much for the info PMCook. Those are the types of issues that the sales guys don't mention.
I'm shocked to hear about the shortcomings in VMS management and the inability to report. Because it is server based system I assumed that reporting (on just about everything) would be one of their strengths.

I am glad to hear that their support is really good and they are responsive to customer enhancement requests.

I must admit that the Cuda's integration and ability to leverage existing (data) infrastructure, Active Directory and external disk storage for the VMS in particular, are very appealing to me.

Have they given you any indication on when the next major revision will be released?

I spoke with Brian West at Cudatel today. The next rev is in QA and will be for 2-3 weeks. Expect a major release in Mid February.

Thanks for sharing your experiences PMCook.
I will be very interested to hear all about the new release after you have installed and tested it.

Should we petition the Ops to create a CudaTel forum?
...and make you a moderator of course
TekMason