VegaStream Vega 400 VoIP Gateway review

The Vega family of VoIP gateways is designed to provide a drop-in solution for businesses that want to move up to VoIP but want to continue using their legacy telephone equipment. Their PBXs can continue to function as normal and the Gateway family can handle anything from analogue lines to ISDN30 installations.

On review is the Vega 400 which is aimed at mid-sized businesses and can handle up to four ISDN30 lines. This latest version now offers four standby ports with hard-wired relays so in the event of a power failure to the Vega the phone lines to the PBX will not be lost. The starting price includes support for up to fifteen simultaneous VoIP calls and license upgrades allow this to be expanded up to 120 simultaneous calls.

The Vega Gateways all support H.323 and SIP and the Vega 400 offers a range of deployment scenarios. For example, you can drop it in front of your PBX where it will carry out all routing decisions or it can be placed alongside where the PBX continues to call the shots. Conversely, it works just as well with companies that have invested in an IP PBX and also want to implement PSTN or ISDN services alongside.

For installation we connected a legacy ArgentOffice PBX to the Vega 400 and configured it to use our Sipgate VoIP account (www.sipgate.co.uk) as well. Previously, installation is not an area that VegaStream has handled well but the review system had the very latest firmware version installed that includes quick start wizards. These make lighter work of getting the basic system up and running but you will still need to have some training from your reseller to be able to make the most of it.

The quick setup page covers all the basic gateway settings where you configure your E1 lines and decide which are to handle emergency numbers which you define in the next page. We found SIP account setup easy enough and liked the options where you can use both SIP service provider and also create peer to peer SIP connections. For the latter you can enter ranges of phone numbers and have them routed to the IP address of a specific VoIP device which could be an IP phone or maybe another Vega gateway.

The two LAN ports can be assigned different QoS profiles which contain signaling and media priorities. Dial plans make the Vega 400 extremely versatile as these can define a huge range of call handling criteria. We created a simple plan to force calls to a particular number to be routed over PSTN but you can go much deeper than this. This is where your training will come into play as there are a lot of commands and parameters you'll need to know. Call planner and call presentation groups also provide options for creating alternative destinations for calls in the event the primary service provider or PSTN line fails. Options are also available for assigning tones to selected sequences

Businesses that want to make the jump to VoIP but don't want see their legacy equipment on the scrapheap should look closer at these VoIP Gateways. The Vega 400 offers an impressive range of call routing features at an affordable price and this latest version adds valuable fault tolerance as well.

Author: Dave Mitchell