Here at work, I’ve got peculiar sort of failure with my Cisco phones. In the mornings, sometimes, all the phones connected to two Cisco Catalyst 3560-X 48-port POE switches all fail around 7:35 am and then all un-fail, all by themselves around 7:50 am.

I’ve tried to engage with Cisco TAC over this issue. I started a ticket when we first started noticing it, in November 2015. Yesterday I got in touch with the first Cisco TAC Engineer and was told that it was a CallManager fault, not a switching fault and that the ticket on the switches would close.

So I opened a new ticket for CallManager. Once I was able to prove my Cisco entitlements I was underway with a new Cisco TAC Engineer. So we shall see how this goes. What concerns me is that Cisco told me that obviously it wasn’t the Catalyst switches. I am a little at odds with this determination because as part of the early diagnosis of this problem we had a small group of users who couldn’t endure phone failures at all, so I moved their connections from the Catalyst 3560 to the other switch, a Catalyst 3850. For the phones that failed on the 3560, they stopped failing when attached to the other switch. That shows me that the issue isn’t with the phones, or the CallManager, but rather the switches themselves. But now that TAC has ruled out the switches, we’re looking at phones and CallManager.

My experience with Cisco so far is checkered. Their hardware is very handsome and works generally. That’s as far as I can go under the auspices of “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” because the rest of what I have to say is unpleasant to hear. Alas, they have a name and public credibility, and one checkered customer isn’t going to alter the path of a machine as large and determined as Cisco.

We’ll see what TAC has for me next. I am eagerly in suspense, and I’ll update this blog if we find the answer. Holding the breath is probably inadvisable.