Install of the unit was fairly straight forward, you configure the networking, set up the extensions, and you are done. Some additional time was spent on setting up the incoming routes, voice mail, etc.

The only tricky part was setting up the SIP extensions. I used a combination of SNOM, Budgetone and Planet handsets. The Planet VIP cordless phones appeared great on paper, but are rather disappointing in real life. They are tiny, the screens are hard to read and the background wallpapers cannot be switched off.

To make matters worse, the Planet cordless extensions appears rather sluggish, taking up to 5 seconds to initiate an inter extension call, and these handsets keeps ringing for at least 3 seconds once another extension in the ring group picks up the call. To add further insult to injury, they do not seem able to display the caller id.

Overall the MyPBX is a great PBX, packed with all the features a small business would need, including call logging, intelligent least cost routing, supports analogue and sip extensions, sip trunks, etc.  The web based admin interface is easy to use, and the interface is very similar to proper asterisk implementations like FreePBX.

From a infrastructure perspective the unit is compact, low power and has a low heat signature. It can easily be run of a small UPS and be locked away in a rack. Great advantage over larger PC based installations using asterisk on Linux.

Performance and general usability is great, with no loss in call quality. The MyPBX can be upgraded to 8 FXO and 8 FXS ports, and can support up to 50 SIP extensions. Out of the box it comes with 4 FXO ports, making it ideal for small businesses.  At only R 3,200 from Scoop it is also a bargain!

I will definitely be using this product again, but will make sure not to use the Planet VIP handsets next time.

Update: I have since the initial installation managed to configure a SIP trunk between the MyPBX unit and a remote Asterisk server, allowing for pure IP based inter-branch calls.  Again the setup was fairly painless, with the MyPBX unit allowing the incoming and outgoing routing via any of its trunks to be as flexible as you need it to be.