sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Other Telephones & Systems Cisco 7910 Series

I have a phone, a cisco 7910 series. Can this phone be used without any kind of hardware like a PBX? I want to use this at home. I have a single VOiP line coming in from vonage. Can this be used on my connection?

The short answer is no, you need to have some sort of IP PBX or soft switch like a Cisco, Allworx, Asterisk, etc. to have the telephone work.

Steve

Can you help me set this up with asterisk?

Hmm, unfortunately I am not versed in Asterisk, but Kumba on this site is very familiar with it and can lead you in the right direction. Good luck and have fun!

Steve

If I don't have an asterisk server set up, shouldn't the phone at least power up when I plug it in with an Ethernet cable?

Those sets require 48VDC to operate.

so the only way to get power is to purchase that adapter?

Even if it were POE (power over ethernet) you would need a POE switch and not a regular ethernet switch. IP telephones are not like regular telephones where they are almost always powered by the cable (line powered), you will need either a power adaptor/cube/brick or a POE switch, and I do not think the 7910 telephones could be POE powered from a regular POE switch.

Steve

The easiest way is to use a cube if you dont have a POE switch. The 7910 uses Ciscos SCCP protocol which can be installed on Asterisk (I use Trixbox). You will need to compile in chan_sccp, create SEP<MAC>.xml, XMLDefault, and have a copy of the firmware. Once that is done you can edit the sccp.conf file and add the phone extension. I have used the above succesfully but it does take some mucking around. There are good docs on trixbox.org about getting a 7940/7960 up and running on SCCP, just follow those and adapt accordingly.

There are lots of places to get the power supply brick for the 7910 - it uses the standard Cisco 48V brick that these phones and the Aironet equipment use.

You can't just follow the Asterisk "7940/7960" instructions, though. Setting up the 7910 is different than these because the SCCP driver does a lot more for the phone than the SIP driver does.

Step 1 is to make sure you've downloaded the latest version of your favorite Asterisk distro. You can go with a straight Trixbox download, or look on "Nerdvittles" for their PBX-In-A-Flash.

Either way, once you have that loaded and it seems to be working, step 2 is to use the "SCCP HowTo V2" at https://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/SCCP-HOWTO2. It will give you all of the information you need to get the phone working. I was amazed at how simply my 7910 installed. The only think I haven't done is upgraded the "Skinny" firmware in the phone.