I don't sell Cisco but do a lot of trouble shooting of the phones. I get called a lot for cable problems that quite often are not the cables. Most of the time they have Cisco phones and I would like to carry a spare Voip phone that I could plug into line to prove cables and port are working. Is there a good Voip test phone out there?

I remember back in the day when you could just do a wire map to prove that the cable was not the problem and the customer was satisfied.

Not any more I even have the Pocketethernet that gives me the results of each pair and if its connected to a switch plus a lot of the time I can give them the CDP info. Some ITs think Cisco never breaks when in reality it's usually the problem.

Plug someone else's phone in at that spot. If it comes up, there's the proof. If the end user has a pc connected thru the phone, is their network and internet working? If it is, you've at least proved the cable isn't the problem.

Thats what I did the other day is took good phone to prove if it was line or phone. 3 bad locations turned out 1 bad switch connection and 2 bad phones. I would like to have something that didn't require shutting down someone else's phone. It was much easier with a single pair.

It's just such a pain having to provision the phone every time you want to use it. There's always some goofy setting somewhere, or something needs to be deleted or some MAC address changed. I keep thinking giving up tin cans and string was a bad idea...