SIP Phone Review: Cisco 7960 and 7940 SIP IP Phone

What is SIP?  SIP is the telephony protocol used with VoIP providers to place VoIP calls.  Out of the other protocols cisco phones support, this review will concentrate specifically on the SIP protocol.

The cisco 7960 houses all of the standard functions you would find in any modern IP phone.  The casing is solid, and there is a button with an adjustable back rest on the phone.  To adjust the angle the phone rests at you simply have to press the button and pull or push the back of the phone.  The phone includes all of the following features.

- WAN and PC ethernet port

- Headset and Handset RJ12 jacks

- Menu, Message and navigation buttons

- 6 line appearances (and the capability to register to 6 separate lines)

- Transfer and Conference soft keys

- Message Waiting Indicator

- POE capabilities

The phones can be configured manually, but you can also have the phones auto-configure via TFTP (using boot option 66 from a router if desired). The ciscos are not capable of pulling their configuration via HTTP, only TFTP protocol. The files required for this configuration can all be found on the cisco website, and the configuration guide is pretty easy to follow. There are a few cons that i have found:

- There really is no way to ensure information security when downloading configs from a TFTP server.

- The default configuration file that applies to all cisco phones using the TFTP server hosts the SIP Proxy IP, and media formatting settings. This is a hold back for any provider that has multiple SIP proxies (for resellers of their own service). You can get around this default problem by cutting all of these variables out of the default config and putting them in the MAC address specific configuration files.

Modifying the configuration is very easy, all the way down to the messages key and other features.

The phone itself has great sound quality (something that used to be hard to find in SIP and now is very common).  The menu is easy to navigate, and the buttons make for easy control of the phones functions.  The PoE capabilities of these phones make them easily deploy-able in any location.

All and all I give these phones a B.