[Asterisk-Users] Polycom IP500 vs Cisco 7940

[Jody N. Rudolph]

The Polycom IP500s do support customized ringtones and can use a customized
ALERT_INFO for all of them. One thing that is worth noting in this
comparison is that the IP500 doesn't support the XHTML microbrowser that the
IP600 does. Since they both use the same SIP application I am hoping they
enable this in future but as of now it doesn't work. I actually had 30 of
these before I found this out but would still recommend these over any phone
in the price range.

Jody N. Rudolph
Heartland Communications Internet Services, Inc
1301 Boadway
Paducah, KY 42001
jody at hcis.net


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com]On Behalf Of Scott Laird
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 1:06 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Polycom IP500 vs Cisco 7940


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

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