Meraki SIP Phones - Why is this not a thing?

[Aquatoes]

With more and more MSP's using Meraki as their platform of choice and more and more MSP's offering some type of VoIP service in their product offering it would be amazing if Meraki would launch a line of truly open SIP phones that also phone home to the Meraki Dashboard for full management. This way even clients that have no networking equipment at all we still have full access into the phone settings should they lose registration to the SIP platform.

Just food for thought and how cool this concept would be. Attached are some AI generated Mock ups for what this could look like 🙂

[RaphaelL]

I don't think that physical phones are the futur. 

We already have removed 35K phones and going to retire 10K this year. I'm pretty sure this trend is also present everywhere.

Meraki used to have a physical phone. They have retired that phone many years ago.

[DarrenOC]

They did a few years back but withdrew from the market when Cisco acquired Broadsoft.

[BlakeRichardson]

There was the Meraki MC range but was pulled as mentioned already. 

https://meraki.cisco.com/lib/pdf/meraki_mc_solution_guide.pdf

[DarrenOC]

They did look sleek and had big potential.

[Aquatoes]

Yea they did. Reminded me of Apple IOS TBO. I wish they would roll something like these out again.

[Aquatoes]

I actually just found some videos on these and these phones look absolutely amazing and I am sad that there is not another solution like this. We are currently a Yealink shop but I would love to have a full Meraki stack end to end for our Telecom division. I wish they would reconsider bringing these back.

[PhilipDAth]

One of the core issues they ran into was scaling it globally.  They could get them to work for a specific list of carriers in a specific market, but this "one at a time" approach would never scale.

I'm with @RaphaelL , I only ever see desk phones being removed.  No one is rolling out new desk phones.

[PatWruk]

We are actually replacing a lot of the old copper lines at our remote locations with new desk phones. Gas stations and service shops will probably have desk phones for a long time

[BlakeRichardson]

I disagree, we rolled out a full new phone system last year. 100+ handsets. We looked at soft-phones and determined for our user base it was to hard and not cost effective with the reasons being

1. End users don't have company provided mobile phones and asking user to install company app's on personal devices creates massive backlash.

2. Because of the above point you suddenly need to supply headsets for each user to use with their laptop so whole offices are not hearing private calls, this is more expensive than buying a shared handset for an office. 

[PhilipDAth]

Have you looked at the Yealink device management platform?
https://www.yealink.com/en/product-detail/device-management-platform 

Also if you are using the Yealink "Microsoft Teams" phones, you can manage them in Intune.

https://www.yealink.com/website-service/download/microsoft-teams-device-deployment-playbook.pdf 

[DarrenOC]

Always been a phone snob and Yealink are plastic boxes with buttons on them….cheap and cheerful. Bit like Avaya phones

[mlefebvre]

What I *could* see is maybe some integration of Broadsoft or Webex Cloud into the Meraki Dashboard since they are going that route for switches and APs, and maybe some of the Cisco MPP style phones getting a Meraki branding/mode that makes them super easy to deploy? It would be convenient, but I'm not sure there is enough of a business case and profit margin for Meraki to go after in this market segment anymore with the prevalence of cellphones and softphones.

[Ryan_Miles]

I have two new MC74s still in their boxes. Part of my Meraki museum now 🙂

[Brash]

Neat. Better than landfill.

You'll have to post up a picture of your Meraki museum some time. 😉

[Aquatoes]

I love how I see lots of people here saying that they are not selling desk phones any more when here I am installing hundreds per month as a small business and I am in a SIP community where businesses are doing thousands of physical phones per month. No offense, mobile application has its place but desk phones are definitely not going away from what I am seeing first hand.

[RaphaelL]

100% agree with you. Phones are not going to die tomorrow that's for sure. 

Everyone ( or enterprise ) have their needs / requirement about telephony which can be very different.

[K2_Josh]

How about we start with Meraki devices being able to natively distribute DHCP leases based on MAC address filters like Windows Server has been able to do for 15+ years?

Yes, I know that all sorts of things can be done with ISE, but that defeats the point of cloud-based system like Meraki.