Cisco's IP Phones - Seven Digits And Cat5

kevin922 writes: "Check it out! IDEO, a small close-knit development firm (they are responsible for products such as the Visor, Transmeta Webslate, and a variety of other cool things) has developed Cisco's new IP Phone. This device (which looks like a normal phone) plugs directly into a 10-baseT connection and has a phone # associated with it. When you plug the phone in somewhere else it takes the # with it. I'm planning on getting some eval units to try out. Should the PBX guys start reading up on TCP/IP? :)" Doesn't look like these things are available just now, but the concept is long, long overdue. Bypass the phone company -- in fact, just ignore the phone company.

Comments

Re:Bypass the phone company my tuckus.

[EQ]

Not true any more.

Look at comapnies like Williams Communications, Qwest - and the newest 800 lb gorilla in the world: Level 3 communications.

They are going to flood the market with cheap bandwidth and knock the old line guys like AT&T and Sprint off at the knees.

Try reading the mini-essay on Silicon Economics at LEvel-3. They have my vote - any company whose CEO lists Snow Crash as one of his favorite novels is definitely out to do things differently.

Lazy question

[kaphka]

I should just try this out myself, but I'll let you guys do the work instead...

When I last tried voice over IP (about four years ago,) the biggest problem that I could see was the latency. The one or two second delay completely destroyed my precise comic timing, which is the only thing preventing people from seeing me as the evil, hearless bastard that I am.

Is it any better today? The latency, I mean?

Cisco IP phones are available now, but...

[Nate237]

this particular phone isn't available yet. The VIP 30 is their flagship phone, and its pretty much as basic looking phone. This is technology that Cisco aquired when they bought Selsius. I'm in the process of deploying Cisco's IP phone systems in two cities now. Eventually we will link them both together and have toll-bypass via our Internet connection. They are pretty cool, but it is not a total PBX killer just yet. There are a few more features needed, but they are probably not far away. As for latency, I haven't noticed any, and the sound quality is as good as regular phone systems. We have had some issues with drop-outs of very quiet calls, but I'm pretty sure its just something we need to tweak on our h323 gateway. For more info on the core server that runs all this, see http://www.selsius.com/univ ercd/cc/td/doc/pcat/7830.htm

3Com NBX100

[COLUG]

The 3Com IP phone system has been out for some time.

VoIP for LANs

[bladel]

My company has been involved in VoIP for nearly 5 years, and while it is extremely sensitive to latency, the response-time and bandwidth for a single full-duplex call has decreased about 10-fold in recent years.

Maybe it's not ready to replace the PSTN yet, but would be ideal for a LAN PBX.

AFAIK, however, there are still some interoperability issues to be ironed out, pertaining to call transfering, multi-party conferencing and other call management features. Still, this is way cool, and brings us one step closer to packet-switched network.

Already done

[Wesley Felter]

The standard is called H.323; you can get an Open Source, patent-free implementation from the OpenH323 project.

Bypass the phone company my tuckus.

[MAXOMENOS]

I love this device. I do. But lest we forget, the people who own the T1 lines, and most of the backbone of the Internet, are the phone companies. It's cool in that you can avoid long distance rates and keep a consistent phone number (maybe). But we can count on LD companies raising their rates for backbone access as voice over IP becomes more popular.

The Second Amendment Sisters