You don’t actually understand the issue with these.
Cisco originally developed the Enterprise firmware a long time ago when there was a serious lack of standards in VoIP. Not in SIP itself, but in the BLF features, AKA “call control” There were a few phone makers sort of trying to standardize but there was a large incentive to NOT standardize because most phone makers looked at VoIP phone sales as a way to customer-lock-in.
Remember that in telephony the very first Private Branch Exchanges were nothing more than the same Strowgear switches that the Bell Telephone company was buying for use internally. At that time, a POTS telephone was exactly the same whether it was used on the PSTN network or a private PBX. Companies that setup PBXes just bought regular telephones as extensions.
But then the early PBX makers started putting multi-line buttons on phones with lightup buttons and so on and suddenly discovered that they could make a LOT of money off telephone set sales, even more than off the PBX itself. During the heyday of the digital PBXes in the 80’s EVERYTHING was proprietary, and the phone system makers were making far more money selling phones than phone systems.
When VoIP started coming in, the old-guard PBX makers like Panasonic, NEC and so on, all came out with VoIP phones that were completely proprietary in their call handling. But, new, young PBX makers hit the market and concentrated on making and selling PBX software not hardware For hardware they used Polycom and Linksys and basically anyone who would make a VoIP SIP phone cheap. This ended up FORCING a de-facto call control standard on the market, basically the Linksys/Cisco 3PCC/Polycom/Yealink standard that we know today.
What Cisco did when they got into the phone system market is they tried playing both sides of the fence. They bought Linksys and sold SPA phones that Linksys made and that played well with Asterisk and other 3rd party VoIP phone systems. But they also tried copying what NEC and Panasonic were doing and making “enterprise” phone systems that used call control that was different than the 3PCC call control. They did not know what would “win” in the market.
Today, Cisco is steering new customer purchases to EITHER multiline phones like the 8841 or the 7841 or to the WebEx softphone if the customer wants a videophone. And they are steering customers to Multiprotocol 3PCC versions of those phones because they are pushing Cisco Cloud Calling and they are pushing on-site hybrid phone systems which tie into the Cloud. The older Enterprise phones are still available new - but Cisco’s Cloud Calling uses 3PCC firmware on the phones.
This is why you are finding the Enterprise versions of these phones ultra-cheap on the used market, because Cisco is slowly moving away from that firmware. Many of their older phones like the 8941 and 6921 which they have discontinued, never had 3PCC firmware and were Enterprise firmware only. For small companies with 25 or fewer extensions, the Cloud phone systems like Ring Central, and Sangoma Talk interfacing with Microsoft Teams and Cisco Cloud, and also re-branded cloud systems, those are the “hottest sellers” because there are so many small older 2x8 and 4x16 and 4x32 and so on digital proprietary phone systems that are still in service but are now 30 years old or older and electronics are failing, and there are fewer and fewer phone techs willing to work on them. In addition, the collapse of Northern Telecom has left a LOT of hybrid key systems completely unsupported, and you have a situation where companies attempting to avoid a forklift replacement of their proprietary digital phone system are picking over the leavings of other companies who are doing forklift replacements and dumping the stuff on Fleabay.
The reality here is that IF Cisco had decided NOT to get into the “cloud phone system” market, it’s highly unlikely they would have released 3PCC upgrade firmware for their x8xx series phones. And, the #1 reason - in my opinion - that Cisco decided to abandon the Enterprise firmware in favor of 3PCC firmware for their own cloud phone system is that it makes it far easier for them to steal customers of other cloud phone systems. They can go for example to a company with 200 Ring Central-rebranded Polycom phones and in one fell swoop move all of them on to their own cloud system since the Polycom firmware uses compatible call control to 3PCC.
But Cisco is killing 2 birds with 1 stone here. The 3PCC firmware is available, for free, to any Cisco phone system customers who have Enterprise phones of the x8xx models, as long as they migrate their on-premise phone systems to Cisco Cloud/Webex calling. So you see, not only can they raid their own customer base they can raid other people’s customer bases by standardizing on 3PCC, which is exactly why they have done so.
For the last 50 years and longer there has been this see-saw of PBX phone systems that used standards-based phones with de-facto call control standards, and PBX phone systems that use complete proprietary phones. This predates VoIP phones and it’s still expressed today with VoIP. I will tell you straight away that for every used 3PCC Cisco or used Polycom or used Yealink or Linksys phone sold, there is a used Panasonic or NEC or whatever other proprietary VoIP or digital phone sold. Even today, Sangoma, who sells PBXact/FreePBX - seeks to profit from sales of brand new phone hardware. Their phones do not have proprietary call control - YET - but don’t think for a second that if they thought they could get away with doing this and getting the customer lock-in that results, that they wouldn’t do it. They probably would. It would likely be expressed in some gimmicky feature most people wouldn’t need - but for sure it would be used as a sales point.
The fact is that when you put what Cisco is doing with their phones into perspective to what everyone else is doing - the reality is that what Cisco is doing really isn’t that bad at all. Yes, you do have to pay for upgrading an Enterprise CP-8841 to 3PCC - but the cost isn’t much - and you only have to pay that if you are NOT going to Cisco’s Webex Cloud calling. The alternative is replacing every one of your phones.
I’d invite you to cost-compare the costs of converting for example a 300-extension site full of CP-8841 Enterprise phones to 3PCC firmware + a brand new PBXact phone system versus the cost of REPLACING all 300 of those extensions with brand new Sangoma phones plus a brand new PBXact phone system. You are going to find that the cost of paying for the 3PCC license for the phones is far cheaper than buying new phones and running around replacing all of them.
So I would say the claim this is “astronomical” is really not fair at all.
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