I was wondering if anyone has the 7970 firmware (SIP, SCCP, any protocol at all), so I can configure and play around with the 7970 I have. Cisco is making things unnecessarily hard for anyone to acquire these things. I don’t think its reasonable to sign a service contract just to be able to setup a phone for a practice lab. Anyone please help. Email to fayawire@gmail.com
Cisco dosent want to just have it out there. You can contact the supplier that you got it from and they should either give it to you or you can probably send it to them and they can do it for you.
Thnks for your response. I got it on ebay just as many of us do and its not possible to do what you recommended. I don’t see a reason why they don’t wan it being out there for people who need it, I just think they want to make senseless money off every single thing like as though all their stuff is not expensive enough as it is. I was also wondering if the sip firmware for the cisco 7960 is usable with the 7970.
Ask the person that you bought it from where they got it from, so you can go to the retailer. Also go to the asterisk list. Some one there may give it to you.
Thanx for your response. I might have to sell the phone eventually. I have combed all of cisco.com and came upon some information that the 7970 firmware can only be upgraded via cisco callmanager and not from within the phones like the 7960s. I don’t have callmanager, even though I initially planned on getting one of their unified routers with callmanager I also discovered that one would need to purchase a license for each phone connected to the callmanager. And the licenses on discount (not original cisco price) sell for almost $200 on ebay. That’s one of the reasons I really do not like cisco for. I will check out the asterisk list.
check out this page for clues, especially the comments at the bottom: voip-info.org/wiki/view/Cisco
I also dislike their service policies… you should be able to upgrade it via tftp. However there is a saying- some things are only free if your time is worthless. I have heard of people struggling for hours just to flash an upgrade to Cisco phones… you need a handful of correctly-formatted config files that tell the phone where to get the upgrade from, how to connect, which file to use, etc etc etc. Useful if you have 10000 of them, not helpful if you have just one.
It’s certainly worht a shot to try, just keep in mind that there is a point of diminishing returns…
Because of these problems this is exaclty why I go with Polycom. Pretty much the same features and a lot easier to work with 
its problems like this because I use AAstra phones SNOM too. Both work great and have non-broken firmware/documentation policies. Both take less than three days to figure out how to flash with new software. Both are responsive to user requests