On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 17:46, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold@obnosis.com> wrote:

...<snip>
I don't see any benefit using Cisco phones over Polycom? It's nice to have a well supported firmware also.

I agree! I've had a clients demand Cisco phones because it was 'what they knew they liked'. It was a trial by fire the first time to figure out how to make them work (registration and other issues at first) and I had to roll my own directory code but that wasn't that hard.

Polycom makes great phones and so does Aastra. The main reason I like Aastra over Polycom isn't that their phones are better (they're on par with Polycom phones) but that they're much more asterisk savvy and way more approachable (I'm nobody and I have the direct line to the Western Regional sales manager). Aastra phones even have a default mode where the phone asks you for it's extension number and password and it seeks out the PBX server (pretty neat) and a nice XML interface to make them do neat tricks. Polycoms have an XML interface that you can drive from the server also. NetXUSA does a pretty good job of supporting Polycom on Asterisk here though.

One other big plus for Aastra phones is that they have no proprietary POE issues to worry about (no special cable or power injector needed; even cheapo dlink POE switches work). I wish more IP phone manufacturers supported the IAX protocol (Asterisk's open source native protocol has less overhead than SIP) but I guess they're hedging their bets and supporting the protocol that everything uses (even though standards vary). The ones I did find that did IAX were complete junk.