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Table of Contents:
i. Background
1. Inability to perform overhead paging using Cisco SCCP phones.
2. Insecurity of Win32 platform on main Cisco softPBX imposes great overhead.
3. Meet-me paging applications are primitive.
4. Cisco's IP phones are too expensive.
5. Cisco's E911 responder servers add risk to a critical aspect of telephony.
6. The exclusively-distributed approach to telephony switching adds unnecessary failure points.
7. There's no program for 24x7 system monitoring provided by Cisco.
8. There's a hug feature gap between CallManager and CallManager Express, making large system design more difficult.
9. Cisco's legacy of non-support for 802.3af is hurting its customers in the long-term.
10. SIP endpoints can't be supported by the CallManager, making Cisco's softPBX a poor choice for service providers.
ii. Conclusion and Recommendations
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10. Only SCCP Phones by the CallManager
Ouch. This one just hurts Cisco. Every other softPBX maker-Nortel, 3com, Avaya, Siemens, Digium, SNOM, the list goes on-supports SIP telephones, and with good reason: SIP is the standard that allows voice calling over IP networks to work outside of a single-vendor design. What's worse is that Cisco makes one of the best SIP phones on the planet, the SIP 7960.
Yet Cisco resellers, and even some Cisco-employed engineers, will tell you how "SIP isn't really ready for prime-time" and "SIP isn't standardized yet". Maybe these guys should talk to the folks over at Xten Networks, or Vonage, or NuFone, or VoicePulse, who've been raking in millions thanks to SIP's complicity in the residential VoIP revolution.
Cisco's response: Buy a media gateway and create a SCCP trunk between it and the CallManager, effectively giving up all the features SIP brings to the table. I think a better approach, if SIP is important to you, would be to wait until Cisco fixes this problem. If time is of the essence, there are plenty of softPBX systems that work fine with SIP phones today and have for years.
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