Cisco phones - why SIP?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi,

I hope to use a mix of 7911 and 7941 phones with an Asterisk setup. I see there is SCCP support available for Asterisk and, from what I’ve read, the Cisco phones seem to work better with SCCP.

For what reasons would one choose to run SIP on their Cisco handsets? How much functionality is lost by not using SCCP? Is SCCP problematic in Asterisk?

The thing I like about the Cisco phones is the XML API. Is this lost if SIP is used?

Thanks,
Aragon

2

I don’t have experience withe 7911 but I have worked extensively with the 7940 and 7960 for the Cisco phone configuration options on our IBeX (http://www.finite-tech.com) system.

The bottom line in my opinion is that SCCP is great if you are using Call Manager and it is taking care of most of the work. SIP does a much better job of integrating with Asterisk and in the long run if you use a system like IBeX (or others) or you figure out the configuration files for the Cisco phones you will have access to a number of features and can integrate these with Asterisk.

Don’t get me wrong SCCP will work with Asterisk, I just don’t have much expereince with it and I think you will find more people running SIP any more than SCCP.

Converting your phones to SIP is quite simple and once you get everything setup you can do a phone every couple of minutes. I do this from my laptop using Pumpkin TFTP server, a small switch and a DHCP server on my laptop (usually Linux running on VMware) to get the phones booted.

3

SIP works well with 7960g, even the XML services are functional as long as you create the xml file properly which goes the same with SCCP. As long as these things are well configured no function/feature is lost. Mine is fully functional, no complaints whatsoever.

4

[quote=“aragon”]Hi,

I hope to use a mix of 7911 and 7941 phones with an Asterisk setup. I see there is SCCP support available for Asterisk and, from what I’ve read, the Cisco phones seem to work better with SCCP.

For what reasons would one choose to run SIP on their Cisco handsets? How much functionality is lost by not using SCCP? Is SCCP problematic in Asterisk?

The thing I like about the Cisco phones is the XML API. Is this lost if SIP is used?

Thanks,
Aragon[/quote]

I am trying to connect a number of 7911 and 7941 phones to Asterisk via SIP. Does anyone have these phones working in a production environment and would be willing to share their SEPxxxxx.xml and dialplan.xml files with me? I am having a devil of a time with these phones.

Thank you.
Paige