Cisco Phones at Safeway Stores

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omnisuperstore
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Cisco Phones at Safeway Stores

Post by omnisuperstore »

Who here is familiar with the telecom at Safeway?

They were a huge Nortel client and then recently switched to Cisco.

My friend worked for NorCal and showed me a sheet that touted the new Cisco phone system about four years ago, it was to include the then new sleek 7800 series phones and IP phones at each register.

From what I see now, the older 7960 phones were installed in departments and analog Piece of Crap Cortelco phones were phones were installed at checklane registers. These register phones are an insult to the original digital Nortel phones that used to be at the registers.

What gives? Someone get a deal on surplus dated equipment?
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Re: Cisco Phones at Safeway Stores

Post by wnetmacman »

The Cisco phone systems are a far cry newer than anything Nortel. And they can run over the standard CAT5 network, where Nortel requires separate wiring and a phone system somewhere in the building.

On the other side, I can tell you through some side jobs I've worked that anything IT is an afterthought for most retail. I saw a Windows 2000 server in a Walmart in late 2017. IBM hasn't made any new POS equipment since 2010, but it still exists in many locations of multiple retailers. Toshiba took over IBM's POS business at that time.
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Re: Cisco Phones at Safeway Stores

Post by Super S »

wnetmacman wrote: January 1st, 2019, 4:44 pm The Cisco phone systems are a far cry newer than anything Nortel. And they can run over the standard CAT5 network, where Nortel requires separate wiring and a phone system somewhere in the building.

On the other side, I can tell you through some side jobs I've worked that anything IT is an afterthought for most retail. I saw a Windows 2000 server in a Walmart in late 2017. IBM hasn't made any new POS equipment since 2010, but it still exists in many locations of multiple retailers. Toshiba took over IBM's POS business at that time.
There are still a handful of businesses in my area, such as industrial suppliers and auto parts stores, as well as one-store operations, that still use dot matrix printers, as well as a few that were still using CRT monitors with green screens as recently as 2 years ago.

IBM systems are still very common, I have seen a few IBM components here and there being replaced with identical units that say Toshiba on them. One Costco near me has a few IBM registers with Toshiba replacement printers.

There are a few businesses near me which have VOIP phone systems that seem to constantly malfunction, one business I often deal with often can't hear me even though I can hear them...the owner spends as little as possible on phones and computer systems and it shows.

Walmart is often regarded as one of the leaders in technology updates, but I suppose there are some stores that fall through the cracks.
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Re: Cisco Phones at Safeway Stores

Post by BillyGr »

Super S wrote: January 1st, 2019, 5:34 pm There are still a handful of businesses in my area, such as industrial suppliers and auto parts stores, as well as one-store operations, that still use dot matrix printers, as well as a few that were still using CRT monitors with green screens as recently as 2 years ago.
One thing that may keep some of those Dot Matrix Printers around is the capacity to use paper that provides multiple copies (which doesn't work in the newer types as they don't actually "touch" the paper, which is needed to make the imprint through to the second or more layer).

Not that you can't just print two (or more) copies with the newer printers, but some may prefer the other - for instance where something is being signed, so that the signature appears on all copies as proof of something being approved/received or whatever.
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Re: Cisco Phones at Safeway Stores

Post by omnisuperstore »

Thank you for your responses. My real question is the fact that Safeway didn’t take advantage of the CAT 5 at each register and they instead installed Cortelco analog old school telephones at each checkouts using the old phone wiring. I assume they pulled the amphenol cable off the Nortel box and plugged it into an analog ATA device on the Cisco. This is a half assed way to do a new setup. A proper IP setup should be IP phones for every extension.

On the contrary Kroger has been rolling out full on IP Cisco 7800 phones to each and every touch point, no analog and no digital. Wondering why Safeway installed such garbage phones at the registers?

I also wonder why they didn’t install the 7800 sets as planned and instead went with the older 7900 series.
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Re: Cisco Phones at Safeway Stores

Post by submariner »

omnisuperstore wrote: January 2nd, 2019, 7:49 pm Thank you for your responses. My real question is the fact that Safeway didn’t take advantage of the CAT 5 at each register and they instead installed Cortelco analog old school telephones at each checkouts using the old phone wiring. I assume they pulled the amphenol cable off the Nortel box and plugged it into an analog ATA device on the Cisco. This is a half assed way to do a new setup. A proper IP setup should be IP phones for every extension.
Not saying you're wrong, but there could be multiple reasons for this. VoIP phones typically run on Power Over Ethernet (PoE) which greatly increase the cost of the switches being used in the network cabinet, and in best practice would not be run on a single Ethernet cable to be shared with the register for two reasons, First, it would complicate the switch configuration by relying on hardware identification to separate the phone onto a separate VLAN than the POS systems (bad practice to have a "flat" network, you want to keep telcom and POS systems on separate virtual networks (VLANs). There might also be a PCI compliance concern there as well. Second, I don't think many, if any POS systems have PoE passthrough, which means on a single-cable setup, you would need to connect the phone first, then passthrough to the POS terminal in a daisy-chain setup. While all of that is technically possible, it can lead to a huge headache to troubleshoot from a support perspective. The second option of course is to double-up the Ethernet lines and have two ports at each register which go to different switches (PoE/Non-PoE) in the network closet.

Basically from a support/cost perspective, it's far less expensive, especially at scale, to have a VoIP-to-POTS converter in the network rack and interface it to regular RJ-11 phone lines at the register with much cheaper analog phones.

\Never knew my daily job would come in handy here, but there you go :D
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