I've had experience with quite a few different phones, so I think I'm qualified to drop my two cents:
Alex is quite right that the Cisco phones are only designed to be used with Cisco Call Manager. They are capable of being decent SIP telephones, but Cisco won't provide the documentation so that you can use them effectively with anything other than Cisco Call Manager, so that's the deal killer. Like everything else Cisco, they're also ridiculously expensive. Despite what Alex says, the Cisco SIP phones have plenty of fundamental flaws. I have a number of expensive 7970G phones with a beautiful color display. Each of the various SIP firmware versions available for that product has a serious flaw. The most acceptable version is about a year old. It's biggest flaw is that the Message Waiting Indicator doesn't work. Most of the other SIP firmware versions won't register with Asterisk. If you are planning to usee Asterisk, save your money and your sanity and buy something else. In my last project, I used the Aastra 480i phones. Yes, the documentation is lacking, but that's largely because the platform was evolving quickly. Aastra has excellent and responsive technical support via e-mail. Finally, the customer was very satisfied with the quality and the price of the 480i phones. In my latest project, I used the newer Aastra 57i and 57i CT phones. It is obvious that these phones derived from the 480i software, but they are much faster and more full-featured with great displays, etc. The initial documentation with these is fairly good and complete. I have them doing all kinds of things, including using the XML capabilities to push server applications to the display, update the softkeys in real-time, etc. As contrasted against Cisco, Aastra even provides PHP include files to greatly simplify web development on whatever platform (Asterisk, Sylantro, etc.) you are using. The 57i phones are a little expensive, but they are a top-notch product that works very well with Asterisk right out of the box. Plus, they look and sound great and have 12 softkeys that shift to 20. One of the others that responded to your question mentioned something about setting up a TFTP server and I want to elaborate on that a little. If you are deploying more than a small handful of phones, you will want to setup a TFTP server anyway. It would be muy loco to try deploying and supporting a few dozen phones otherwise. Many of the phone's features aren't even accessible through the web interface anyway - you have to have a TFTP server and make use of the configuration files for full functionality. And that applies to Aastra, Cisco, Polycom or whatever. Finally, it can take a fair amount of labor to configure Asterisk and your particular phone to work together as a system. Don't kill yourself by attempting to mix and match various phones on the same system as that seriously increases the complexity. Keep it simple. For what it's worth.... Ken _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
