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

• Asterisk phone cisco SPA5xx: Asterisk configuration tips
• Cisco 79xx IP Phones: Asterisk configuration tips
• Cisco 79xx IP Phones: XML applications with DashPhone CXP and DashPhone Application Server (see white paper)
• Cisco ATA 18x Analog IP Adaptor: Asterisk configuration tips
• Cisco FXO Ports: Asterisk configuration tips
• High Density Voice Module (NM-HDV) in Cisco 2600/3600/3700 router: You'll need IOS 12.3 for full SIP functionality.
• Cisco AS5XXX: Large boxes for multiple E1/T1s or modems
• Cisco 2811: Dua PRI gateway and how to pass names to Nortel.
• Cisco 827-4V: ADSL router with ethernet and 4 FXS voice ports (for analog phones), T.38 Fax Relay
• QoS Cisco IOS
• QoS Cisco

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 When last checked, there's no online registration available, only a page with an email address that's no longer valid. ...