Comment Re:VOIP isn't everywhere? Good! (Score 1) 660
A lot of people don't do this; they have some Cisco phones lying around from their previous vendor, and simply point them at the new SIP server's IP along with the SIP auth information. It depends on who their previous provider was to determine if they had UCM or have any meaningful access to it.
Frankly, Cisco's SIP stack is completely half-assed. They were dragged kicking and screaming to support SIP at all, which was (is?) a competitor with their own SCCP crap, and when you look at the release notes of the SIP firmware for their phones, their open caveats are often complete show-stoppers, yet they release them anyway. What the hell?
That said, it sounds like the original poster's problem is mostly a lack of proper network design, like they just threw all the phones and computers on the same network without any VLANs or QoS and assumed it'd work. Sadly, this is an extremely common problem with VoIP, because customers don't have any understanding of how it works and just want a plug-and-play solution, not one that's going to require them to expend time or effort into network planning.