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Pulver Innovations had a WiSIP phone that would connect over your LAN to act as a standard SIP phone, which you could use, for example, with Free World Dialup or asterisk@home. Unfortunately, as one article points out, most WiFi hot spots don't co-operate and the the phone connect, so it has some major limitations. Even Pulver doesn't push it anymore... I had a tough time finding a link to it on any of their sites.

They also had a gadget that you could plug a cell phone into that would allow you to preferentially use the cell phone's free minutes for long distance calls from your VOIP system. Since most cell phones come with a huge number of free long distance minutes, it might be worth the lower quality to some, but I can't even find a link to it any more :(

I prefer FreeWorld Dialup as a great way to go for voip:
 
- standards based
- Free
- Windows , Linux and pocketpc clients available
- Call 800 numbers and more
- Call to/from vonage customers
- get free phone number and have people call you
- Get a wisip phone (WiFi SIP) and you have the closest thing to a IP mobile phone you can get.
 
  FreeWorld Dialup

This is by no means the first wifi phone. Its cool and the price point looks pretty attractive, but if your interesting in existing technology check it out:

BroadVoice branded Wisip Phone (standards standards standards)
Pulver Innovations (unbranded) Wisip Phone (for the purists)
Cisco's sexily titled IP Phone 7920 (like they'd be behind the curve!)
and
Zyxel's Prestige 2000W

There's probably more, but thats what google coughed up for "wifi phone" tonight (in the first couple of pages..I have a life you know. Just kidding!).

I've been doing a lot of research for the past 2 day and the Wisip phones are what your talking about. I've been drooling ever since I saw it.

Since SIP phones seem to be pretty damn cool (open standards, I guess companies like Lingo and Packet8 use proprietary hardware which can spell limited choices and hardware lock-in) Wisip phones seem to be the way to go (it helps that they've got that tech-fetishist look going on too!).

Pulver Innovatoins
Xiologix

An added bonus of using a SIP based service is you can use plain old computer hardware to connect too, which means even if you don't have the extra change for the Wisip, you can schlep your laptop with you and when you plug it into a (broadband) network you can access your phone, make calls, etc.

I don't know anything about any of that though, because I just started doing research. Maybe someone can jump in, I'm curious how well (or not) this all works.

So far my favorite company seems to be BroadVoice. Anyone have any experience? Is Vonage SIP based?

Have you looked at VOIP handsets like this?

As someone else mentioned - FreeWorld Dialup is a great way to go for voip:

- standards based
- Free
- Windows, Linux and pocketpc clients available
- Call 800 numbers and more
- Call to/from vonage customers
- get free phone number and have people call you
- Get a wisip phone (WiFi SIP) and you have the closest thing to a IP mobile phone you can get.

FreeWorld Dialup

I'm currently running windows and ipaq (pocketpc 2002) clients fine. And calling my home vonage service - no problem!

you really think this would get much time "in the rest of the world"? ha!

just get a good old wifi phone and you'll never know the difference.

wifi phones from pulver.com

Me and a friend did this a while ago, I was using my Palm PDA with WiFi and he was using his WiSip.

It really works: you go near a hotspot, tell the phone to search for an AP and a few seconds later you are talking on the phone.

It is really sweet, and with the local Telco/DSL provider covering the city(Monterrey) with APs, soon you will be able to get a signal almost anywere here.

WiFi surely is interesting :) But I guess I'm biased.

The Cisco 7920 only supports the skinny/sccp protocol used by the their call manager system (runs on WinNT and successors). This is interesting as it uses the ietf produced protocol SIPv2. Pulver also has one here. Still "nothing new", but represents more geeky products in the SIP world.

Wow, it looks almost exactly like the WiSIP that Jeff Pulver, founder of Free World Dialup, has been selling on Pulver Innovations for about a year now.

Wow, it looks almost exactly like the WiSIP that Jeff Pulver, founder of Free World Dialup, has been selling on Pulver Innovations for about a year now.

Your dream come true?

NB: I haven't tried one of these devices myself.

There are a number of 802.11b VoIP devices currently available on the market.

Cisco makes the 2920 but still requires Cisco call manager as a back end.

and one of the more affordibale and interesting products is the Pulver Innovations WiSIP Phone. (short for WiFi SIP).

As well as other products made by companys like Symblol

Between these and Asterisk, "The Open Source Linux PBX" (which works quite well btw) you can come up with great solutions, and some really neat applications.

You're using them with the Skinny (aka call manager software) i'm sure. for those of you that want a SIP based 802.11 IP phone, you might find this link interesting. here

I will be introducing WiFi SIP phones branded for use with Free World DIalup in september at
Fall 2003 VON
via the pulverInnovations brand.