Curious choices made by Cisco/Tandberg

[Bill Owens]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 11:38:20AM -0500, Hannigan, Martin wrote:
> > On Thu, 3 Mar 2011, Bill Owens wrote:
> > 
> >> We have a Cisco/Tandberg H.323 endpoint, the C20 model. This week the network
> >> engineer who takes care of it decided to do a code upgrade to fix a security
> >> problem, and found out that the firmware now supports IPv6. Good news, right?
> 
> I wouldn't be too fast to assume that this is lack of clue. I would guess
> that it's a processor limit = cost. Why would you need to dual stack your
> phone regardless?

Not a phone - it's an HD-capable H.323 video conferencing unit:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11333/index.html

You're exactly right, if a networked phone is in a walled garden and only talks to it's call manager, it can use anything (VoNetBIOS for all I care). In this case, the only purpose for the C20 is to make and receive video calls with outside endpoints, and I think there's a pretty clear need for it to be able to talk both v4 and v6 without being reconfigured by an admin.

That said, we already own the unit, didn't specify anything about v6 when we bought it, and aren't going to junk it just because it has this shortcoming. It probably won't even limit the useful lifetime of the unit, given the set of people we do video calls with. We do hope, though, that Cisco/Tandberg eventually decides to enable dual-stack.

Bill.