As everyone may know, we currently run our Asterisk system with a mishmash of Cisco phones. Mostly 7940’s, some 7912’s, and a few others here and there. However, we’re in the process of evaluating various types of phones to expand our network into a more standards compliant, capable network of phones. This is what brings me here today, which phone do we like the best?

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I think it’ll be easier to just list out the pros and cons of our system that make it better for us.

• Cisco (7940, 7960, etc)
  • Pros
    • Easy configuration for some phones
      • Particularly the 7940/7960 pairs are extremely simple to configure. Provisioning an entire campus of these phones is as easy as dropping a 5 line configuration file in the tftp boot directory.
    • Great sound quality out of the box
  • Cons
    • Configuration isn't unified
      • If you try to configure anything but the 79[46]0's, get ready for some hell with binary commands to do text->binary conversions for the phone to download it's configs.
    • Stripped SIP firmware
      • The SIP firmware doesn't support everything it could, such as Shared Lines.
    • COST
• Polycom (430, 501, 601)
  • Pros
    • Unified configuration
    • Good sound quality
    • More SIP compliant
  • Cons
    • Slow boot time
    • Smaller screens and less XML browsing support
• Aastra
  • Pros
    • Same physical design as Meridian phones
    • More customizable
  • Cons
    • Both of the phones we received were dead within one week of receiving them, so we weren't able to do much testing.
    • Shoddy VLAN support

We still haven’t fully decided on a product to use, but I’m personally going to recommend the Polycom’s, as they tend to be the better of the three major companies we looked into. There are a number of other companies (Grandstream, SNOM, etc) whose products would be great for smaller companies, but they don’t feel very “professional”.