Bugs in the SPA9000/SPA400

William Paulsen · ‎03-08-2010

I bought the SPA9000/SPA400 and 10 SPA504/SPA525 phone sets, for use with 4 analog PSTN lines, thinking this could be easily setup. Here's a list of problems that I'm having, and the only response from multiple calls to tech support is basically: Oh Well.

1. This only way to configure an extension for voice mail is through the Wizard. The SPA9000 admin manual describes exactly how to do with the web interface to the SPA9000 and SPA400, but this simply does not work. (Any customizations to, say, dial plans, will be wiped out by using the wizard) You basically need to know at your initial setup exactly which extensions will always have voice mailboxes. Even a hard reset of the SPA9000 and SPA400 will never be able to remove these extensions - the firmware can never delete these from its flash memory. And adding mailboxes later with remove customizations.

2. When I have three extensions on one Shared Line Appearance, I see strange behavior. This is confirmed by another recent posting on this forum. The SPA9000 admin manual clearly states an SLA can have multiple extensions, but apparently 2 is the max. This is not good.

3. I can't get external access to the voice mail system - I always get a fast busy.

4. Cisco customer support's standard answer is mostly, Use the Wizard for everything, or Reset the Box. Unfortunately the wizard does not covers much.

And yes, all firmware is up to date.

Alberto Montilla · ‎03-09-2010

Dear Sir;

Please see below some comments/additional questions:

wrpaulsen@gmail.com wrote:

I bought the SPA9000/SPA400 and 10 SPA504/SPA525 phone sets, for use with 4 analog PSTN lines, thinking this could be easily setup. Here's a list of problems that I'm having, and the only response from multiple calls to tech support is basically: Oh Well.

1. This only way to configure an extension for voice mail is through the Wizard. The SPA9000 admin manual describes exactly how to do with the web interface to the SPA9000 and SPA400, but this simply does not work. (Any customizations to, say, dial plans, will be wiped out by using the wizard) You basically need to know at your initial setup exactly which extensions will always have voice mailboxes. Even a hard reset of the SPA9000 and SPA400 will never be able to remove these extensions - the firmware can never delete these from its flash memory. And adding mailboxes later with remove customizations.

[Alberto] I don't fully understand the issue. You can run the wizard multiple times over the same installation to perform changes over your existing installation. We strongly recommend using the wizard as it is easier to configure what the system can do.

2. When I have three extensions on one Shared Line Appearance, I see strange behavior. This is confirmed by another recent posting on this forum. The SPA9000 admin manual clearly states an SLA can have multiple extensions, but apparently 2 is the max. This is not good.

[Alberto] Are you refering to Busing Lamp Function (BLF) or Shared Line Appearance (SLA). With BLF there is the limit of only one monitoring station per line, but on shared lines you can have multiple users sharing same line.

3. I can't get external access to the voice mail system - I always get a fast busy.

[Alberto] This is likely have to do with configuration. Fast busy typically means vmm is not available (voicemail number)

4. Cisco customer support's standard answer is mostly, Use the Wizard for everything, or Reset the Box. Unfortunately the wizard does not covers much.

[Alberto] What feature are you looking that wizard does not provide? As I understand Wizard provides support for most features used in common deployments.

And yes, all firmware is up to date.

Regards
Alberto

William Paulsen · ‎03-09-2010

Thanks for your responses, Alberto.

As for the Wizard, each time I do a "submit", many items that I had customized using the web interface are overwritten, for example dial plans. In addition, the wizard does not allow customization of SPA5xx phones. It does not allow setup of SLAs. etc.

One problem I see with SLAs is inconsistent behavior. On 3 phones that each share the same extension id, if a call is places on hold, sometimes the call appearances on the other phones simply disappear. This inconsistent behavior is consistent - reboots don't help.

And the fast busy for vmm is not good, because not all phones are configured for voice mail boxes. For example: Suppose a phone set has Line 1 user id that is not configured for a voice mail box. It's impossible to call vmm from that phone.

The wizard does not support: SPA5xx phone, SLA, separate dial plans on FXS, aa scripts. It seems the wizard is meant to be used exactly once and only once. If you don't get it right then even a hard reset of the SPA9000 will not clear everything (for example, t's not possible to ever remove a voice mail box from a user id, once it's been set in the wizard. That user id will always show up in the SPA9000 mail box status.)