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

This will force Cisco customers to adopt Cisco's power standard (CP) at a time when it is being obsoleted by the rest of the industry. Even Cisco will eventually turn away from their own CP standard, and early adopters of CP will be forced to spend hundreds of thousands on new switches in the next several years, forklifting their investment. Smart VoIP implementers will recognize that Cisco Power has a much shorter lifespan than 802.3af, and will protect their infrastructural investment by advocating 802.3af.

A big problem with CP is that is prohibits its users from delivering line power to any phones other than Cisco's. If you wanted to use some line-powered SIP conference stations because Cisco doesn't offer a comparable conference station, you'd have to power them off of a separate power supply, or using a power injector that does proper 802.3af. Since we'll be required to use CP if we go with Cisco phones, we won't be able to use Polycom conference stations, or any other brand of IP phone, because they support 802.3af power rather than the Cisco-only CP power.

Cisco really missed the ball on in-line power, and their resellers have been caught using misinformation to cover for them. One Cisco reseller said that the reason it took Cisco so long to offer 802.3af (March 2004) in their Ethernet switches was because of a patent lawsuit filed against Cisco regarding the standard. The truth is, 802.3af was ratified in June of 2003 by the IEEE, and it couldn't have been ratified if their were a lawsuit pending against he IEEE. Furthermore, if you felt the IEEE was ripping off your power idea and infringing your patent rights, why would you sue Cisco and not the IEEE? It just doesn't add up, yet this is the line Cisco resellers are giving potential customers as a way of downplaying the importance of the 802.3af standard.

Unless there's a retrofit for 802.3af power on 7940 and 7960 phones, then I don't
think there's an easy solution to this problem. Of course, future Cisco IP phones will undoubtedly support 802.3af just as their new 7970 phone does.

Cisco's Response: This issue, while still a problem, has been somewhat abated by Cisco Systems. Cisco provides port-by-port auto-negotiation of inline power, so it's possible to support 802.3af and CP-powered devices on the same switch. But Cisco still has no official plans to do power-injection through a patch panel, so if you use Cisco's IP phones, you're still locked in to using Cisco switches… no matter how much of a discount Foundry Networks or Nortel Networks steps up to the plate with. Now, over the long run, is Cisco going to gain or lose more customers as a result of this fumble?