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Experience with and templates for Cisco phones

Posted by thirdlane on Thu, 01/14/2016

My turn to ask questions on our forum :)

A customer is interested in supporting a whole range of Cisco phones in Thirdlane.

Anyone using any of these, and if so, would you be able to share "real world" working templates or experience?

Cisco 3905
Cisco 7942
Cisco 7965
Cisco 7960
Cisco 7975
Cisco 6921
Cisco 9971
Cisco 7911
Cisco 9951
Cisco 7962
Cisco 7912

Thanks!


Submitted by eeman on Wed, 02/03/2016 Permalink

Its not worth the effort. Those phones are not SIP native. This means you have to find the SIP software which makes the phones work in limited capacity. Some problems include BLF failures, MWI not working, Agonizing bootup times (has to reboot 3 times in some cases). They often require the user to scour the internet for out-of-date SIP software that are subject to very common hacks and exploits. Expansion modules do not work. The conference phones do not work.

That's a lot of shit not working to turn a $300 phone into a basic 9 key handset thats even less useful than a $55 ATA and a $7 walmart phone.

given how little of the phone even functions, they are just as well off programming the sip username and password straight into it without a template, since nothing else is going to work anyway. Without the sip software they are truly screwed.

Submitted by jakevxobee on Fri, 02/05/2016 Permalink

I dug into this awhile ago as we had some 7960's there were dropping calls that originated from iSymphony...

It turned out that the phones were ignoring an invite. Looked like a firmware update was probably in order.

Unfortunately the last version of SIP firmware release for the Cisco devices I see is 8.12(0), which was released May of 2009. I do not believe Cisco is developing SIP firmware for these devices any longer.
Either way they are a pain for what they offer to be frank.

Submitted by jaime@netline.cl on Tue, 04/19/2016 Permalink

Hi Alex,

Nice to meet you, I'm worked on this phones last months, here are my experince about it:

The following models has worked fine with the las SIP Software (9.4 from 2015) at nearly full capacity, including BLF, DND, Call Forward, Expansion modules, Spanish language, etc.
- Cisco 3905
- Cisco 6921
- Cisco 9971
- Cisco 9951

The following models worked including BLF, DND, Call Forward,Spanish language, but Not Expansion module:
- Cisco 7942
- Cisco 7960
- Cisco 7962
- Cisco 7965
- Cisco 7975

This phone has worked (ver. 8.4 from 2008) including DND, Call Forward, etc. but only in english:
- Cisco 7911

The following model are very old and limited options, it has SIP software from 2005:
- Cisco 7912

Regards
Jaime