macVoIP.com
the web home of Ted Wallingford
Cisco Versus the World
Succeeding with Cisco IP Telephony
from a Customer's Perspective
© Ted Wallingford 2003 - 2004

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

 3. Limitations of meet-me paging
Cisco currently supports meet-me conferencing, a feature that allows ad-hoc conference calls to be set up, often adjacently to an overhead page where parties are invited to participate. However, Cisco imposes a limitation that makes this feature far less useful than it currently is with even the most archaic PBX: Cisco does not support non-Cisco phones of any kind for starting a meetme conference-no analog cordless phones, and no inexpensive third-party IP phones. The originator of the meet-me conference must always be on a Cisco SCCP phone, period. So, you can't use analog phones, cell-phones, or even SIP phones.

In a nutshell, you aren't going to be building a VoIP teleconferencing startup using CallManager.

There is no solution to this problem that I am aware of.

Cisco's Response: Cisco has confessed they have no solution, nor any plan for a
solution, to these limitations.