POTD: Avaya 9650 IP Deskphone

This little fancy gadget is the 9650 IP Deskphone from Avaya. Introduced in 2006, to replace the 6 year old 4600 Series; these phones were initially thought of as clones to Cisco given some of the similarities. This was also Avaya’s first sets to move away from the simple to use user interface, to the flip phone like functionality (to change ringers, you do not press Conference when idling, and most one touch features doubled or doubled in a half.) Sadly the legacy AT&T, then Lucent to become Avaya’s simple, telephone line focused digital or IP sets were never applauded. (This is why I rave this company I used to kinda favor.)

In 2008, similar paper-desi sets came along as the 1600 Series, and digital sets 9500 and 9400 series and 1400 series for paper desis. In the Avaya world, people like to choose to express how they want to assign their buttons. In color and their own words. Some sets that use screens instead do not allow the systems administrator to use their own form of assigning buttons. If you want to put blame, blame the customer, but remember the customer is the one whose right, not the vendor at least in traditional American business norms.

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Rants: Sales & Marketing’s Abusive Telephony Agenda

If you thought the previous post on lies about TDM PBX not capable of modern telephony was good, then to use the ol Ron Popiel cliche But Wait There’s More!

This post will be a little raunchy, I should’ve posted this on my personal site, but I couldn’t help to resist when I got a couple off-site feedback from people defending my first one, so “the hits keep on coming!” I hope.

This same site had another post from some dude that can’t tell ISDN from T1 or that anything that supports TDM telephony because afterall TDM is automatically native to VOIP technology. The practices of torture, lies and manipulation from S&M (now did you get the innuendo?) is just getting complex now. Anyone that wants to push SIP as a be-all-end-all solution is now getting pushed to customers who can’t a) fight back or b) they don’t know anything about telecom/telephony so they’ll take a solution and in many VOIP setups w/out telecom support, they leave the system abandoned and most often the VOIP system plus the S&M types push and torture, will often be unsupported, phones crashing, users wanting assistance to then be denied by the heartless IT administrators… (why am I writing this during the holidays when this should be more of a Halloween themed post?)

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