Cisco

Cisco Systems, Inc

Cisco's IP telephony products offer great flexibility, a large feature set, and stand up well to every day corporate use. That being said, they're also not the cheapest in the field.

Products


Most likely you'll need access to firmware packages for upgrades or version changes, i.e. converting a phone from SCCP to SIP. The files are available on Cisco's website along with a good amount of documentation but you'll need a service contract. The service contract for a Cisco phone is around $8/year. The service contract price will be based on the value of the item you want covered. Cisco has several support options. You just need the most basic support in order to be able to get updated software.


GKTMP

GKTMP is Cisco's open, but proprietary, protocol used for communication between a call control device such as a Cisco Gatekeeper or SIP Proxy and an external application such as a route server. GKTMP, which stands for GateKeeper Transaction Message Protocol, was originally developed for H.323 gatekeepers but since it is a rich and lightweight Operations and Billing Support System (OSS/BSS) protocol, it is equally useful as an API to external applications for SIP proxies or B2BUAs. A major benefit of GKTMP is the ability to offload complex routing algorithms, such as least cost routing tables with hundreds of thousands of routes, to an external server.

An open source module which provides a GKTMP interface to open source OSP servers, such as OpenOSP and RAMS on www.sipfoundry.org/OSP, is available at sourceforge.net/projects/gktmp-to-osp.

Service Contract


Obtaining a service contract directly from cisco can be a lot of fun. When last checked, there's no online registration available, only a page with an email address that's no longer valid. You could try:
1 800 553 6387 option 4

If you're just looking to obtain firmware for an IP phone product the minimum contract agreement is 8x5xNBD at $8 for 1 year, chances are you don't need a three year on-site agreement for well over $100.

It will take one of the largest technology companies on the planet several days to process your request at which point you'll get a contract number via email. After registering your contract number on their service center website the technically advanced system will tell you a person will validate your contract and grant you access to the firmware files you need within 24 hours.

As an alternative, Cisco service contracts can be purchased from authorized Cisco resellers, the process will probably be easier, and the price about the same.

SmartNet part numbers (basic 8x5xNBD 1 year contract)

7920 WiFi IP phone = CON-SNT-CP7920
7940 IP phone = CON-SNT-CP7940 = $8 US ($9 others)
7960 IP phone = CON-SNT-CP7960 = $8 US ($9 others)
ATA-186 = CON-SNT-ATA186 = $8 US ($9 others)

My Experiences

Here is what I went through to get this contract. First off the phone number above just got me someone telling me they couldn't sell me what I wanted and basically they didn't know what exactly I needed. So I ended up finding out I needed to buy the Service Contract, aka SmartNet contract, for one of my phones...so I called up a reseller for cisco phones...www.ams.net is a good one and asked them to sell me the contract. After this was taken care of I got the contract number from them and under my "Guest" cisco account profile I added it to my additional access. The next step is to wait until they approve it being added to your account. Now then it's still a pain because there is no other information after it's been added. You need to then navigate to this link to download the software for your phone. This is a several day process =/...Good Luck — mitchel

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Created by: rgauss,Last modification on Tue 14 of Oct, 2008 [20:45 UTC] by coryandrews


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