I don’t comment much here anymore because I’m not necessarily up to date
on the latest/greatest for fiber and fixed wireless stuffs - but I do
know a thing or two about VoIP ;-)
Oh, I love to hate Cisco. But hey,… a topic I know a ton about (my home
lab has probably 100 different VoIP devices in it, and a few rotary
phones, too).
First and foremost, Cisco does not have a significant part of the VoIP
endpoint market anymore. I can’t seem to find any of the reports I had
access to (they would likely be a bit outdated) but the market at least
a few years ago was something like 85% Yealink and Poly with the rest of
the vendors fighting it out.
I wouldn’t touch Cisco with a 10ft pole, personally, at this point. The
ATAs are still good, just pricey. Make sure you purchase one with an
OpenSIP license unless you are running CallManager. It should have 3GPP
in the part number (if I recall correctly). The license to switch is
more than buying a new phone in typical Cisco fashion. Provisioning can
be via HTTP and HTTPS… it probably still supports TFTP if you are
masochistic. I don’t know if they have a ZTP platform because we may
have two or three phones on our entire switch, and we openly tell our
resellers we won’t support them.
Provisioning any phone behind a firewall that supports provisioning
methods outside of TFTP isn’t a big deal. Grandstream is actually one
of the worst vendors for this unless using GDMS - their devices do not
respond to SIP NOTIFY messages to resync the configuration file well.
Most vendors have a free ZTP service like GDMS as well.
Yealink is by far my favorite brand, but I support a ton of Grandstream
as well. Poly was a big part of what I worked with day to day before
the HP acquisition. Almost none of our clients deploy that anymore… I
get more requests for Fanvil, Snom, and HTek support than HP/Poly.
Poly, or your client would likely know them as Polycom… would be the
route I would take. Poly is a well-known brand owned by a well-known
brand. Their phones are stupid expensive, like Cisco's, but they have a
lot of good fundamental technology under the hood. A CCX 500 was my
daily driver for a while (I rotate every 6 months or so between brands)
but I’d likely steer you towards the Edge series of phones. Even the
E100 has integrated bluetooth. The E100 without power supply is around
$120.
There are not many distribution partners for Poly anymore. The rare one
off when I need to, I purchase through Ingram Micro/NETX USA.
Happy to help if I can.
atheral-logo
Daniel White
Co-Founder
phone: +1 (702) 470-2770
direct: +1 (702) 470-2766
1309 Coffeen Ave Ste 5838
Sheridan, Wyoming 82801
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------ Original Message ------
From "Nate Burke" <n...@blastcomm.com>
To "AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group" <af@af.afmug.com>
Date 4/1/2025 11:41:14 AM
Subject [AFMUG] Desk VoIP Phones
We've been using grandstream phones for quite a while, cheap and easy to
provision. One of my new business customers is making a stink because 'he's
never heard of Grandstream, these phones just don't work with my bluetooth
headset, I NEED a Cisco phone because that's a real phone' I'm thinking that
it's mainly about ego, that his friends probably have Cisco phones on their
desks, and he doesn't, so he's making up issues.
I haven't used Cisco phones in many years, Linksys SPA504G's were my last
dabble into non-grandstream phones.
It looks like a Cisco phone with Bluetooth (A requirement) is about $550 for an
8851. How do you provision those? Is there any sort of cloud provisioning?
Still done with TFTP? Put some sort of call manager on site? I really like
that I can provision the Grandstream phones while they are behind the customers
firewall without having to do any port forwarding etc. Cisco always used to
like Licensing, is that still the case to use them with normal SIP, or are they
all SIP now.
Just wondering if it's worth trying to investigate Cisco phones for this one
customer, or if Cisco phones really want a Cisco Callmanager on the backend.
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