CISCO VOIP Phone 7940

Author's Rating:

Pros: Nice looking feature rich phone

Cons: Unreliable, tempermental, not user programmable, quality

The Bottom Line: 
Avoid this phone like the plague. Lease them. Looks good but CISCO quality is questionable. Very expensive. Cheaper better alternatives are out there.

Author's Review
I purchased 23 of these phones for our company conversion to VOIP. The phone is a feature rich combination of functionality and convenience. Our goal was to eliminate the need to install an expensive phone system in each of our offices.

As advertised, the phones have all of the features you would expect from a key telephone system (ie multi line phone system common in businesses and offices)

Our vendor uses the SIP protocol. That is when the fun began. Out of the 23 phones we purchased, we have had to send 7 back to the vendor for various defects. The defects included, configuration errors that could only be corrected by technician, power supply issues and general failure.

The phones when they work are great. They have voice mail, dozens of ring tones and web based management. In my opinion, these phones are not ready for prime time. This is not just because of the high failure rate, but because CISCO phones and systems tend to be much more expensive than competing brands. You are paying almost double for the CISCO brand name. They are not the best VOIP phones out there, not by a long shot.

Half of what you get with a VOIP phone is on the service provider side. The software they program into the phone makes a lot of difference so shop it carefully and beware of long service contracts.

We are getting rid of all of our CISCO phones and will be leasing Polycom phones from a new vendor because they are just a royal pain in the rear in just about all aspects.

VOIP phones require special tuning of your computer network. You need one drop for each phone because voice quality and network prioritization of packets needs to be dealt with. Another issue we had with our vendors is that no one could advise me what appliances are needed on your network to allow the phones to coexist with the rest of your network.

Even with 20 years of experience in computer networking, I had an extremely difficult time getting our phones to work. You need a 2 or 3 layer switch (according to one tech) along with line filters and various other hardware.

In the end, it cost us nearly twice as much to deploy these phones as projected, not to mention the down time, and flakiness of the overall system.

I can't blame it all on the phones. Be very careful selecting your service provider and beware of hidden costs to reprogram the phones, update the firmware (must be done for each vendor specifically) purchase power supplies, filters, additional network jacks or drops and switches.

When they work you can't beat it. Just make sure you don't shut off your POTS lines before your VOIP phones are stabilized.

It took us 5 months to get them all up and working. About 1 phone fails per month. You are much better off leasing any type of VOIP equipment because the protocols and standards are changing.