Cisco's latest 79x1 lineup (including 7906G)

Introduction

Cisco recently released a new series of IP phones, the 7906G, 7911G, 7941G, 7961G and 7971G series. The 7941 and up also come in a G-GE model which has gigabit copper connectivity through the phone, the others have just standard 10/100 for the phone and on the additional PC port. All these new phones sport new cool features, mostly along the lines of newer and better display units, initial support for SIP, but additionally - and this is a major change - config file management, which is now XML based rather than plain (name,value) text pairs. These phones supposedly will, in the future, support an enhanced range of features compared to the 79x0 series.

Some product documentation on them can be found here

Note that the 7941G and 7961G have been superseded by the 7942 and 7962 model phones. The End-Of-Sale and End-Of-Life announcement for the hardware of the 7941 and 7961 series phones can be found here.

Unfortunately the format of the config files has never been well documented on CCO and Google searching shows up a limited amount of content on "cisco SIP and cnf.xml", so this page serves as a reference guide to getting these phones working with SIP compliant phone services such as Asterisk. I recently opened a TAC case to find out more information about the format of the config files but Cisco were unwilling to assist - as as far as they are concerned if the phones are run in a CallManager environment (which is what they were intended for) there is no need to manually edit the config files therefore they were not willing to give help running them in a non CM environment. It's a real shame really because these phones really are very nice handsets, and even if cisco did not want to support third party SIP servers, they could at least make information available so that others could do so.

Here's a sample config file, documented tags are listed below. Note there is a minor error in this file as noted below. If you are aware of how to fix it please do so.

Please DO read this file in detail. You must change instances of things like YOURNTPSERVER and replace them either with an NTP server IP address, or remove the statement altogether. Leaving them in will confuse your phone, and at the very least cause it to reject parts of the config, if it loads it at all.

Config File Editing

Note that the config file contents appear to be case sensitive, and most of the parameters start with a small letter after the opening bracket.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

This line is strictly not needed, but is useful to have if you're trying to use characters not in the US-ASCII character range. ...