Comparison between Media Gateway and IP PBX

There are many questions risen by the CIOs of many corporate companies in regards with the reliability and the return on investments on any purchase on the IP PBX and IP Telephony products and solutions. Many have purchase the IP PBXs and only utilized the voice features without realizing the additional costs and the difficulties of using the IP (telephony) features. Why?

Customers Need	The Solutions
	Media Gateway	IP PBX
Organizations want a fast Return on Investment (ROI). They want to reduce the company’s total cost of network ownership.	Media gateway can be easily installed without redesigning the whole IP network. Besides VoIP, organizations can immediately enjoy IP based applications like IP based centralized call centre, IP based unified messaging, mobility, call billing, fax over IP, and streamlining administrative tasks, with just some minor configurations and programming.	Organizations need to purchase IP based PBXs which is still very costly. IP PBX is always design to be installed behind the Local Area Network (LAN) because they do not have bandwidth management. They need a layer 3 (class 3) switch to assist on the classification of incoming voice and data packets. Redesigning the existing IP network will take time. Customers have to pay for user and hardware licenses. Furthermore, IP PBX works on leased line, VPN, managed IP network with fix IP address. These are all very expensive investments.
Organizations need investment guarantee. Organizations dislike hidden cost after they purchase the IP solution.	Media gateway is very simple. All you need is a broadband service. Users are unlimited. No need additional license because it is already included when you first purchase the gateway. No need CPU or CPU license. Organizations’ interest is always protected.	If organizations need to add additional users, additional IP channels, IP applications, organizations need to pay for additional hardware like IP card, new CPU engine to support IP, and IP phones. Beside these, they also have to pay for additional user licenses, CPU engine license, and IP card licenses. These are all hidden costs.
Organizations will always ask for a back-up, for all calls to the PSTN / ISDN if ever there is not enough bandwidth on IP network / leased line due to much consumption of bandwidth by internal staffs like running video streaming, downloading large file, running a corporate mail server.	Media gateway will ensure sufficient bandwidth for all successful quality calls no matter how heavily the bandwidth is consume by other application equipments. Therefore, calls will never need to be use PSTN / ISDN services. Indirectly, no dial-up charges to be involved.	High-end IP PBX emphasis on this feature. Voice vendors will always give organizations the assurance that calls will fall back to the PSTN/ISDN (without customers realizing it) if they encountered lack of bandwidth for the voice conversation. Therefore, organizations have to bear for the costs of PSTN / ISDN usages unwisely.
Some organizations will request to use dynamic IP for their aDSL because it is cheap. Normally, it is for their branches, at remote sites.	Media gateway support dynamic IP for their aDSL. Therefore, it can also help organizations to have a remote office or a home office. This will eventually be very virtual alike to these organizations.	High-end IP PBX could not support dynamic IP. This is because that most IP PBXs do not have a gatekeeper. Therefore, for remote site, voice (PABX) vendors will always ask customers to have a leased line (with maybe 128 kbps in Malaysia) for the transmission of their voice and data packets. This will be very costly.
Organizations want to keep their existing PABX. Or they want to connect different brand of PABX through VoIP.	Media gateway connects all brands of PABX through VoIP. It can also connect to key-phone, IP phone and even a single analog phone. It is very interoperability.	Interoperability is a very big question to the voice (PBX) vendors. If different locations have different brands PBX, the organization needs to arrange all these brands’ PBX vendors in order to deploy VoIP (or to link up these branches). Normally, these voice vendors will request the organization to change to the same brand.
Organizations want good voice quality.	Media Gateway provide excellent voice quality with bandwidth management functions and QOS	IP PBX has to work with high-end switches and routers to produce good voice quality (if they are sharing the network trunk). If the network is meant for voice transmission only, organizations are normally advised to install a leased line, a frame relay or a managed IP network.