Provisioning Cisco 7940, 7941, 7942, 7960, 7961, and 7962 IP Phones in 3CX

I am working on a configuration guide for the Cisco 7940, 7941, 7942, 7960, 7961, and 7962 IP Phones, including templates that work in 3CX version 14 and 15.

These Cisco phones are really just marginally supported in 3CX, which is too bad, because they are good solid phones and there is a huge inventory of them still floating around.  For those of us that are moving away from the expense of Cisco Call Manager, it saves a ton of upfront costs by repurposing these phones with 3CX.  If you are starting from scratch, I don’t necessarily recommend purchasing these phones; although they are basically a “dime a dozen” on eBay which could get a money strapped company into VoIP on the cheap.

This guide will help you implement these Cisco phones way beyond what 3CX offers out of the “box.”  In fact, you can’t even get them to work with the default installation of 3CX because there is no TFTP service and the provisioning templates are flawed.  

The biggest issues with these phones are that they need to be converted to SIP mode, they still need to get configuration files via TFTP which isn't included in 3CX, and they don't have BLF's.  In fact with the 79x0 phones you can't even program the buttons for speed dials via 3CX.

This guide will step you through the whole process and give you much more advanced provisioning templates that will allow you to configure the line buttons as alternate line appearances (like in Call Manager), and will allow you to use a Session Border Controller (SBC) proxy if needed as the phones don't support STUN.

I will be selling this guide for $49, but believe me, if you don't have a clue on what to do this will save you and your company hours and hours of time literally, and get you ahead of the game with a much more powerful provisioning template.  If you were to hire a consultant (at say $150 an  hour) it would take them a minimum of an hour to get this working for you, and that's only if they had done this before.  If they are not familiar with the process you could end up paying $1000 for them to figure it out for you.  I've done the research for you (and battle tested it with over 200 phones) and now it will be compiled in this guide which will tell you exactly what you need to do and provide you with my own custom provisioning templates that actually work.  

If you are reading this and want it NOW, comment below so I'll know if there is any demand.  Then I'll hurry up and finish it!  

Doing ASA Quality of Service (QOS) on DSL or Cable Internet

PROBLEM

Needed a way to help improve the QOS on our Cisco IP Phones (we use mainly 7940 / 7941 and 7960 / 7961 phones). On our WAN there is no problem as it is all controlled via our own routers and our VOIP provider's routers which we have direct T1's with.  Our Cisco Call Manager is hosted by a VOIP solution provider, the equipment is not at our site (not that it really matters). 

So the problems were at our small remote project sites which usually only have DSL or Cable Internet connections to the internet (not direct to our VOIP provider).  We know and fully understand that we really can't control QOS over the internet but the IP Phones have worked out pretty well in the past with out it.  However, recently these sites have been doing a lot more paperless work which is taking up a lot more outbound bandwidth because of scanning documents and uploading to a project web-site with a document repository.  Whenever someone was scanning documents (which uploaded to an off-site server) the phone quality went down the tubes.  This is mostly noticed by the person on the other (remote) end, not the employee at the project site.  

WHAT TO DO?