Category Archives: Tech
Dear Cisco [Jabber, Umi, Skype, Google Edition]
Dear Cisco,
I know you’re an enterprise-focused company and in light of recent events you’ve proven your loyalty there. But let’s take a look at that consumer market in a different light, because your competitors are doing just that. First up:
Skype… oh yeah, and Microsoft
No one seems to be quite sure if Microsoft understands what they did here and the incredible potential the purchase provides. I work with enterprises to design their UC systems every day and lately I’ve been hearing a lot of this, “What’s the deal with SIP trunking? Can I use that to connect to Skype? We have a bunch of vendor support teams in *insertforeigncountryhere* that only use Skype. Plus, all our execs use Skype when they travel.”
This next idea should scare the daylights out of anyone on Cisco’s sales team. Native Skype “node” built into MS Lync 2.0’s edge server. Take a look at these usage numbers from Wikipedia. Direct access to all those users from your Lync client using their impressive SILK super-wideband, adaptive bitrate, audio codec and also offering video (conferencing)? Everyone was scratching their heads, but it’s a wonder Skype wasn’t snapped up by Cisco or Microsoft sooner.
And then there’s Google – http://goo.gl/WjwNj
Google may not be an enterprise UC player yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t soon be taking a share of the SMB market through their Google Apps program by adding GVoice in the near future. Could you imagine if Google offered a simple IVR to all of their GApps customers? For the <20 user businesses it’d be incredible. Now take a look at the link above if you haven’t already. Chrome OS + native & free video chat using their new WebRTC & iLBC? Instant access to all of their existing gMail, gTalk & GVoice users? With high-quality audio & video? The power of the masses strikes again.
So where does this leave Cisco? It means that while they cancelled Flip, may be selling Linksys, and Umi is a flop because they doesn’t get consumer pricing, they still have an opportunity with consumer UC. Cisco needs to attack the consumer market with their own free desktop IM/presence/voice/video client just like their competitors. I think that opportunity is Umi Connect.
(sidenote – WebEx Connect? Umi Connect? Is it possible they’re using the same Client Services Framework backend for this Umi Connect client? please say yes)
Back on point, supposedly a Umi Connect desktop client will be available for free to Umi subscribers this fall. I say make it available for free to anyone this fall. Charge for video voicemail storage, charge for the Umi hardware, but give the client away for free. Your competitors are doing it. Build native federation between Umi Connect and WebEx Connect. Make federation to a corporate Cisco Unified Presence Server a checkbox to select during install. Give away a free client, connect it to the meet.webex.com beta site and you’ll have users by the boatload. And then you’ll have a leg to stand on when Microsoft announces a builtin Skype node in Lync 2.0.
Cisco 894x
Update on July 9th, 2012: This post was originally published in June 2011. A year later a lot has changed.
First, Cisco quickly came out with a matching SIP load so they are not limited to just SCCP. From what I’ve seen there is feature parity between the two and if I had a choice I’d pick SIP. Hopefully Cisco continues to invest more heavily in the SIP loads as they’ve done with their other high-end models.
Second, a number of initial gripes are fixed in recent firmware.
- Custom backgrounds & ringers
- Max/call busy trigger is now configurable
- Mobility & DND are now available as softkeys
- Many other little fixes here and there
This thing has been my primary desk phone for quite a few months now and I’m growing to like it. There are still a few things I’d like to see fixed (e.g. Phone VPN), but if I were faced with a purchasing decision today I would favor this over a 7942/45 and in most cases the 7962/65. I’d accept the fact that I’ll be doing regular firmware upgrades over the next year or so and balance it with the fact that I “future-proofed” my environment by offering video & Bluetooth to a large population of workers.
*When wouldn’t I use these to replace a 796x phone? When I need sidecars. And in that case, I’d move up to an 8961/9951/9971 and use the KEMs. They have some really nice high call volume features. The phone + KEM costs a bit more, but for the few people who need them it’s worth it.
Cisco recently released their new 8941/45 phones with built-in video cameras. A few interesting observations, but first the differences between the two.
The 8941 lacks gigabit network connectivity and Bluetooth, but comes in as a Class 1 PoE device (3.84w or less). The 8945 adds gig & Bluetooth, but still comes in much lower on the power scale than any of Cisco’s other phones with a color screen or video running between 6-7w when the screen is active.
Perhaps the most interesting design decision is the fact that the default firmware (and only fw at the moment) is SCCP, an interesting departure from their other recent high-end phones that run SIP (the 8961/9951/9971). I really expected SIP to be the go-to fw for all new phones. Especially considering the camera, why not re-purpose existing 9900 code rather than write all new fw from scratch?
A couple comments on the physical design of the phone. First, new finish & new handset. Take the finish from the bodies of the 7900 & 9900 phones, mix and serve for the 894x. Handset looks to be the same as the one that will come with the Cius dock. I miss the meaty 7900 handsets, but this is much better than 9900 handsets. Screen looks great, in some ways more crisp & clean the 9971. Disappointing that it appears there is no way to add a sidecar/KEM and no USB ports.
I had very high hopes for this phone and thought it would be the replacement for the 794x/6x phones that brought video to the masses. Unfortunately, while the hardware is all there the firmware is beyond disappointing. The good news? Firmware can be fixed. A few things that Cisco should consider non-negotiable when they release an information worker phone:
- No Phone VPN support.
- No custom background or ringtone support.
- UI is slow, e.g. phone can’t keep up with me when I’m dialing, much less moving through the setting or service menus.
- Hardcoded max call/busy trigger (3/2) just like the 6900s. Poor shared line support due to this. Ridiculous that Cisco thinks this is acceptable for a phone of this caliber.
- Pre-config’d softkeys like the 9900s (not the 7900s). Another frustrating aspect. Mobility & DND can’t be put on softkeys, so those 4 line buttons get cut down to 2 very quickly and you’re back to a 794x.
- Other miscellaneous things like not supporting Visual Voicemail give you the feeling that Cisco pushed this one out the door a little early.
Using DNS SRV Records with IOS Dial Peers
Ah… IOS. Refreshing after spending a week with ACME Packet’s ACLI. And at the same time it certainly has it’s own frustrations. It took me a while to get this working in my lab (partially because I was in Boston and my lab is most decidedly not), but I have a feeling DNS SRV records with SIP are going to prove very useful to me in the future.
The goal here: use DNS SRV records to minimize the number of dial-peers required in IOS. Typically CUCM is set up in some sort of redundant fashion so that there are multiple call processing servers. Going deeper, the configuration of CUCM is such that CM Groups are created with a max of three servers per group meaning everything needs to be pointed at two or three different servers in case one goes down. So we want to use one dial-peer to send a particular call to a CM Group made up of three servers rather than the usual three.
VoIP dial-peers use session targets to determine where to send a matching call. With no DNS SRV records each pattern would require three dial-peers using preference commands as shown below (Note: The use of an ipv4: target vs dns: target makes no difference here, I am using ipv4 in this example for contrast. DNS A records for each server would still require three dial-peers, it is only with DNS SRV records that we can collapse three dial-peers down into one).
dial-peer voice 1 voip destination-pattern 2000 preference 1 session protocol sipv2 session target ipv4:10.0.0.1 dial-peer voice 2 voip destination-pattern 2000 preference 2 session protocol sipv2 session target ipv4:10.0.0.2 dial-peer voice 3 voip destination-pattern 2000 preference 3 session protocol sipv2 session target ipv4:10.0.0.3
With DNS SRV records we can cut this down to one dial-peer:
dial-peer voice 1 voip destination-pattern 2000 session protocol sipv2 session target dns:cmgroup1.lab.local
along with a little extra config (to host the DNS SRV records in IOS to remove reliance on the corporate DNS server)
ip host cucm1.lab.local 10.0.0.1 ip host cucm2.lab.local 10.0.0.2 ip host cucm3.lab.local 10.0.0.3 ip host _sip._udp.cmgroup1.lab.local srv 1 50 5060 cucm1.lab.local ip host _sip._udp.cmgroup1.lab.local srv 1 50 5060 cucm2.lab.local ip host _sip._udp.cmgroup1.lab.local srv 1 50 5060 cucm3.lab.local ip name-server 127.0.0.1 ip domain name lab.local
Finally, in order for a CUCM subscriber server to accept a SIP URI with a destination of @cmgroup1.lab.local rather than @<servername>.lab.local each parent DNS SRV records (cmgroup1.lab.local) must be added to the Cluster FQDN list in Enterprise Parameters. If this step is not completed, expect to see SIP 404 Not Found errors. From the CUCM Help:
This parameter defines one or more Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) for this cluster. Multiple FQDNs must be separated by a space. Wildcards can be specified within an FQDN using an asterisk (*). Examples are cluster-1.rtp.cisco.com and *.cisco.com. Requests containing URLs (for example, SIP calls) whose host portion matches any of the FQDNs in this parameter will be recognized as a request destined for this cluster and/or devices attached to it.
Many thanks to these helpful resources, the first in the list is an especially good resource:
Gateway Configuration for SIP Proxy Redundancy
Load Balance Between SIP Dial-Peers
Designing Unified CVP for High Availability
Cisco IOS SIP Configuration Guide, 15.0
ACME Packet Training
I spent the last week in Boston, MA at ACME Packet taking a configuration basics course for their Net-Net 4000 products. For those not familiar with ACME Packet, they make Session Border Controllers for VoIP applications. They claim to be the inventor of the SBC and historically have sold to carriers (and done very well). They recently bought Covergence, aiming to take a stab at the enterprise & commercial market with their rebranded Net-Net 2600.
A few thoughts from the last week:
- Anyone who is familiar with 1) configuring network devices via a CLI and can telnet/ssh/ftp via a command line and 2) VoIP & SIP should skip straight to their advanced configuration class. Out of the five days only two were all that useful (Wed/Thur when we talked about basic SIP config for the Net-Net in Access Backbone and Peering environments).
- These products are powerful in a big way. Very impressed by the product both in terms of features and scalability.
- I’m a little green (only been in the industry 3-4 years), but in my mind ACME has put together a horrendous CLI (they call it the ACLI, ACME CLI). I really like where they’re headed with the object-oriented nature, but the implementation is downright scary. Even the simplest configuration tasks quickly become painful. Be ready for huge, complex configs while you curse & swear at your keyboard finding yourself yet again lost in their poorly labeled contexts.
- Their Net-Net 2600 is an especially interesting product in that it fits very well in the enterprise & commercial space. On-box transcoding up to 400 sessions and (according to them) all the same features as their 3800-4500 products make for quite the SBC. If you figure 400 sessions is ~17 PRIs you can see this “low-end” model will scale very well for most organizations. And that’s only if you need transcoding. Take out the transcoding and the session limits go sky-high like their other products. I’m very interested in taking the config class for the 2600 product.
- Pricing. I’ve only heard rumors, but it sounds like their products are ridiculously expensive. I think the pricing might have worked well in the carrier space, but they may have a difficult time penetrating the enterprise market if the numbers I’ve heard are actually true. If I can buy 10 3900-series ISR G2’s from Cisco for the same price as one ACME Net-Net I’m going to have a tough time justifying the purchase to mgmt even if it is the better product.
