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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

 4. Expensive phones
Cisco's SCCP phones are very feature-rich, probably the best IP phones on the
market. But the entry-price for these phones (Cisco 7940) lists for about $400. That's $200 more than you'll pay for a top-line TDM display phone. Whereas, Avaya offers an IP phone (Avaya 4602) with programmable display, inline power, and multiple line appearances for about $200. When looking at expanding a telecom setup for a small, new venture, cost is always king-and Cisco's SCCP phones are lacking on the low-end. The same argument could be made for field offices and telecommuters. Where's the entry-level phone in Cisco's product line? There isn't one.

My problem with this is that it keeps experimenters out of the technology. If Cisco wants ground-floor users working with their phones, don't they need to make them accessible? The solution here is to use SIP phones like those from Avaya and Polycom with the Cisco CallManager (for those cost-sensitive situations), albeit without all the Cisco-only features SCCP brings to the table. Of course, why not just use a non-Cisco softPBX while you're at it, too? Cisco isn't doing too much to compel us otherwise.

Cisco's Response: Cisco's response was to say that Cisco's phone really aren't
that expensive, once channel discounts are applied.