In validating a customer design recently, I have run into what seems to be product support hole. I'm hoping that someone from Cisco can comment here.
I'm working on a UC upgrade design for a customer. They are looking to upgrade to CUCM 8.6 and replace a bunch of their phones with 8941s. The customer design is centraized call processing with SRST remotes and local PSTN trunking at the remotes. Their existing voice gateway routers are all 2800 series, exact models vary depending on the number of phones supported at each remote site.
I went to validate the supportability of the 8941 for SRST on the remote branches and found that the 8941 is not supported under SRST8.6. A bit more digging showed that the 8941 is supported under CME 8.8. While there is no published documentation on SRST8.8, it would seem to be a valid assumption that SRST phone supportability for SRST 8.8 will be the same as CME 8.8. It has always been so in the past.
Jumping into feature navigator, I found that CME 8.8 is only going to be supported on the ISR G2 (2900/3900) routers. Once again history shows that SRST and CME supportability move in lock-step, so it would seem that SRST8.8 is only going to be supported in the ISR G2.
If this is the case, then Cisco has essentailly obsoleted the 2800/3800 routers even before they are finished selling them (for voice customers at least). We are going to be forced to tell our customers that to upgrade to the newest video phones, (the ones that Cisco is touting as the next genereation, the ones that Cisco is incenting their partners to sell) they are going to have to replace their entire base of ISR G1 routers. In some cases, these routers will have been installed for only a year.
I'm hoping that there is something in the pipeline that is going to extend SRST support for the ISR G1 routers for the 8900 phones and that future phone releases will also be supported for a reasonable amount of time.
Comments?
