[Asterisk-Users] Polycom IP500 vs Cisco 7940

[Scott Laird]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 9:53 AM, Matt G wrote:
>
> I've been asked to determine which phones our organization should go 
> with. And I've narrowed it down to the Polycom IP500 or the Cisco 
> 7940.
>
> From my travels through google, it's hard to find a definitive 
> comparison of the two phones. So I thought I would ask the people that 
> have probably used both.
>
> From what I can tell, the only major benefit the Cisco has over the 
> Polycom is
> * 24 ring tones
> * XML support
> * Help Button
> * Larger Screen (is this true? 2x24 vs the 160x80 on the polycom)

The screen on the Cisco isn't very big, either--192x96 or so, if I 
remember correctly.  I'm running 6.3 on my 7940, and I haven't seen the 
ability to do anything interesting with ringtones.  In theory, you can 
feed new tones to it, but you can't use them for ALERT_INFO-driven 
distinctive ringing.  The XML support is okay, but rumors suggest that 
the newest Polycom firmware supports something very close to XHTML, 
which would be a lot more powerful then Cisco's sparsely-documented XML 
dialect.

> Another question that came up while discussing the Cisco phones was if 
> the 24 ring tones are 'assignable' (ie, user calls in with callerid 
> saying 'sales' and it rings a certain way, if they call in with 
> callerid saying 'tech support' it rings something else). I couldn't 
> find any information on this on google, so if anyone has the answer to 
> this that would be great.

I don't think it can do that.  You can set ALERT_INFO in Asterisk to 
Bellcore-drX, where X is 1..5, and the phone will ring slightly 
differently, but that may or may not be good enough for your purposes.

> Other than that, the polycom seems to have all the features we want, 
> and according to the wiki works quite well with asterisk and has many 
> features enabled that seem pretty interesting (MWI, etc). The Cisco's 
> on the other hand seem less straightforward to configure and not as 
> much talk on the wiki, nor support.

MWI works just fine on the 7940, so I'm not sure that I'd count that as 
an advantage for the Polycom.

I haven't seen a Polycom in person, but I haven't heard anything bad 
about them.  My 7940 works well, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend 
it, but for the money, the Polycom is quite likely a better phone.  I 
didn't find the 7940 to be particularly difficult to configure, 
*EXCEPT* for the initial installation of the SIP firmware.  It's a 
multi-step upgrade, because you can't directly upgrade from the SCCP 
image that it ships with to a modern SIP image.  Once you get past 
that, it isn't too bad, particularly if you have multiple phones.


Scott