atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX Cisco Telephones and Systems CISCO IP PHONES

DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY EXPERIENCE WITH CISCO IP PHONES AND SYSTEMS? WE HAVE A CUSTOMER WHO IS LEANING HEAVILY THAT DIRECTION FOR A NEW SYSTEM AND WE WOULD LIKE TO STILL BE INVOLVED IF THEY DECIDE TO GO THAT ROUTE. DOES IT PRETTY MUCH BECOME A IT TECH THING TO CONTROL. WE ARE BUT HUMBLE PHONE TECHS AND THEY ARE A LARGE AND GOOD CUSTOMRE WHO WE DON'T WANT TO LOSE. ANY FEEDBACK OR DOCS WOULD BE GREAT.
THANKS
EMMITT2727

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I would stay away. Any phone system running windows is bound for failure. I have a friend who reboots his cisco CM every night for fear of failure.

We put cisco phones in about 2 years ago. We are running ver 3.3 on our call managers and 4.0 on Unity with unified msging.
We have upgraded our Unity once and are starting to think of upgrading our call managers to the latest version.
I can honestly say that over the two year span we have had to reboot our call managers MAYBE 3 or 4 times and our Unity probably around 6-8 times. It has actually been a very dependable system with very few problems.
I have worked on Mitel, Inter-tel and Telrad pbx and key systems that had more problems and were not as reliable as this system.

The one very important thing is you must have a strong enough infrastructure to run voip, if you don't, forget it.
BTW, we have redundant call managers with hot swappable IDE drives. Our unity is not redundant at the moment.

why would you need to be redundant?? let alone reboot

emmitt unless you plan on going to school for the product it may not be worth the stress. They may just end up back were they started and you will continue to service them.

as far as experience with cisco,, two of my customers went to them and came back to tdm, I am waiting on the third.

A friend of mine works for a huge banking chain that just tried to merge to cisco based on there sales pitch, its not going well and I believe they are going back to siemens soon. My friend is very cisco certified and cant stand the product

Why reboot or have redundancy? Well, I recall many times I've had to reboot different pbx's, key systems, lost databases, etc., and this was the "old reliable stuff".
I have heard from so many old timers, "Mitel is the best, blah blah blah." So why does Mitel have redundancy backplanes built in as well as other systems? Why do they need to be re-booted every now and then?
School for the Cisco system? If you have been in the phone business awhile cisco is pretty easy to figure out on your own or with about 30 minutes of training. Now if you have never programmed a phone system the class definitely would not hurt you.

Obviously your customers went back because one of two things.
1. Either they didn't have the infrastructure to support voip or
2. There vendors didn't know enough to correctly install and implement a successful voip system

I am not implying that Cisco is the best or whatever, I'm just stating my experience with them.
Personally I think the Inter-tel Axxess was a much more powerful feature rich system than the Cisco. I have not seen any of the newer Inter-tel stuff but I'm sure it is just as impressive.
As far as quality and up time though, I have been completely satisfied with Cisco.
So while you will hear all the horror stories like I heard when my company made this decision (believe me I was very worried about putting these phones in), there are also success stories like ours, thank goodness!
And in case your wondering, right now on our cisco system we are supporting around 600 end users spread out over 6 locations with in a 3 mile radius. Our main campus is all fiber between locations and 3 other locations are DSL's.
So nothing too big but decent for our area.

You forgot the 3rd thing. You CAN tell voice is on IP and not TDM. But, since we are all used to crappy cell phones no one really cares unless it affects business.

HMMM, I guess we are just lucky because all of our calls are just like regular old phone calls. I've never had a problem with echo, stutter, jitter and whatever else.
Actually that third thing your referring to is because of my first point. They don't have a good enough infrastructure to suppport Voip.
Like I said I'm not saying these are the best but for the quality of calls and the up time I can recommend them. I'm just giving my honest opinion with my experiences and Cisco phones.

Lucky or you have never compared then side by side or perhaps you are not using any compression.