Comments on: How to get new Allworx firmware when your Allworx box fails to download the files

By: james

james — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:13:02 +0000

The system has generally matured since some of these posts. The product can still be frustrating but at the same time, we have few IT products here that are flawless. They have moved to a support contract system now and will no longer give you firmware updates but they did not notify us through our update system (which has changed twice now since this article originated). Some of the features we wanted have been implemented so we now have call queuing, remote phones and can schedule times for each auto attendant to be on/off independently. This last feature was enough for us to pay $300 for a year contract with a local provider as we had to go through some crazy loopholes to schedule vacation days which were different per department / auto attendant.

As of today, right now, I would have a hard time recommending this system. We have better documentation so more of our staff has a central place to go to when there are problems and we now have a set procedure when problems arise. We still have to reboot the phones about once a month though at least there is a global reboot function now. After a recent firmware upgrade and some port changes we are starting to pick up calls every now and then with no incoming voice. There aren’t many systems that are better at a reasonable cost however. The last alternate systems we used were Ringcentral (web based, which we used before allworx) and we looked at Tribox when we were having a lot of Allworx problems. Tribox has more freedom with the phones and we still aren’t happy with our Allworx phones. They are fairly expensive, have good voice quality and poor speakerphone quality. We have a mix of 9212 and 9224 phones and would choose 9224 universally given then greater flexibility. If I switched today I might go with Tribox and Polycom phones.

By: Pamela

Pamela — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:09:02 +0000

Is there anything new to report on 6x, 9224 Allworx and phones. Our IT company is pushing us to go with this phone system, which we would purchase, but after reading all the blogs, I will admit that I am a bit worried. Does anyone have anything “good” to report and do you feel that this would be a good move from our Inter-tel VoIP phones we currently have.

By: charles

charles — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:54:41 +0000

We just implemented an 8 site Allworx PBX.
The speaker phone on the 9212 does suck.
However the speaker on the 9204 is much better, almost on par with the Polycom 430. Go figure.
I hear the 9224 also does not have as bad a speaker phone as the 9212.
We’re using adtran 4430 routers and adtran netvanta 1238 PoE switches.

By: james

james — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:21:04 +0000

I’m glad to hear you had a good experience with Allworx support and were able to get a technical person to walk through wireshark data as it provides a LOT of detail. I will check the port negotiation, this is something I haven’t had to look at on any piece of equipment since 2002 or so with the exception of dealing with GigE and jumbo frames. All of our Enterprise level equipment has properly handled port negotiation and our devices are all GigE full duplex with the exception of a few devices which are 100M full duplex.

With regard to the Allworx Support, our reseller didn’t have the technical knowledge to understand our problems and Allworx said talk to your reseller. This went back and forth and we have gotten little technical help. I would love to simply call support and receive the excellent help you have, I truly would. I am also keenly aware that there may be some other network issue at play here though our enterprise network is behaving at peak performance otherwise. I would love to work with them to figure out the issues but they won’t give me the time of day and our reseller just doesn’t have the technical knowledge. So here we are. Stuck. With a product that might perform well if we could get support and figure out the issues. As it stands, our phones are the weakest link in our corporate network and we plan to migrate away from Allworx due to the too frequent problems, total lack of support. To your point, this piece of equipment is so important to our business that we will need to replace the Allworx product due to poor performance and reliability.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:31:32 +0000

You guys having trouble with this PBX have to have something going on that’s network related. It sounds like you may have Duplex issues on your switches. The PBX needs to be set at a static speed and your port on your switch needs to match. Forget about AUTO. Not going to work. If it does, expect it to fail at some point. You need to ensure that you configure this device perfectly or you WILL have problems. This is a very important piece of equipment in your network, like your router, layer 3 devices and backup. You need to pay special attention when configuring this device and if you do not know how to do something don’t guess, call support! The support is actually very good…but you are right; they cannot reproduce YOUR network problem! You need to work with them and figure it out. I have been on the phone with support for hours running wireshark to find out the specific issues going on on my network and they have been great. They could have “flushed” me but they worked with my instead.

Thanks guys.

PS - Randy @ Allworx is an allstar!! Thanks for the all the help!

By: dew3flr

dew3flr — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:14:19 +0000

James, re: switches - started with 3com, then linksys/cisco, and currently a TrendNet POE switch.

Interesting on the voicemail -> email pull vs. push.

I personally use a blackberry via IMAP to pull off the allworx box. It does work well I have to say! Others, we push out to their corp. email, but really haven’t had any consistent problems on that front.

Interesting - to hang the allworx right on the router. Do you then run the allworx in lan host mode? I was told that the 6x prefers that, as it frees up processing power.

By: james

james — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:53:03 +0000

Thanks for the commentary, it would certainly be nice for them to have some recommended network environment data and any little fixes documented but that seems to be asking too much. We have had a streak of a few weeks of reasonable performance here after looking in our dual wan vpn enterprise router logs and making a few tweaks. We also changed our voicemail sent over email from a push to a pull system which has greatly improved our voicemail handling (we now get voicemails and the messages stay on the local phones RELIABLY).

I’d be interested to know what model switch you are using. We actually have our Allworx 6x behind the dmz port on our router which auto-negotiates to 100Mbps full duplex.

By: dew3flr

dew3flr — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:22:39 +0000

Have had same problems with Allworx6x as Don & James. Software version 7.0.4.2, Allworx tech support often worthless as they can’t duplicate a network taking down an allworx6x LAN or WAN port. What they don’t seem to simulate is a real work environment, e.g. network printers, scanners, copiers, Apple talk traffic for design groups, throw in some netbios and ipx traffic from someone in the office that brought in a laptop and never turned that off.

Anyway we’ve had some stabilization by putting a managed switch in place and slowing the port that the allworx6x plugs into down to 10Mb Full Duplex. Also disable broadcast storm control, and multicast filtering.

The speakerphone duplex - problem we haven’t had as much of an issue, its not perfect but it is better than the old system we had in place.

Hope the above helps someone else out there - and I hope it keeps working!

Also hope that Allworx/Paetec comes to the reality that they do have network phones and by saying its a network problem = means they have a problem!

By: james

james — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:16:02 +0000

Don W,

About 1-2 times a month we reboot our phone system because something goes horribly awry. Our Allworx 6x commonly enters into some of the following situations:

1. Calls come in and ring at the stations but when a receiver tries to pick up the call, nothing happens. We have to reboot the Allworx 6x to recover
2. The Allworx 6x freezes and stops responding to calls entirely. Reboot required.
3. We have random failures either pushing or pulling voicemail emails. The email system doesn’t work very well with modern email clients and/or services. Reboot Required.
4. Many other odd or new situations in which a reboot is required for system recovery

I keep hoping that new firmware will fix the problems we continue to have and they do not. This coupled with marketing material that has directly false information (duplex speakerphones you say? What? Oh, I couldn’t hear you speaking at the same time because the speakerphone is in fact not duplex) is pushing us to look for something that is more reliable for the future.

By: Don W

Don W — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:48:31 +0000

Hi James, we recently got an allworx 6x system and phones. The sys software is the latest. Interestingly the system crashed today - phones on the network lost calls, and registration and the 6x became ‘unavailable’ or un ping-able.

We powercycled the unit and it started working again - called allworx and they said its a network problem - ‘no kidding’ they’re network phones. Something seems to be able to take the 6x off line… ?

Have you ever come across anything like that?