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Cisco to Ship Wi-Fi Phone in June

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the wardriving-to-save-on-long-distance dept.

Marvinthehaggler writes "According to Computer Weekly's site, Cisco Systems plans to start shipping its Wi-Fi mobile phone to US channel partners in June, with availability in other countries soon after. The phone communicates only with 802.11b technology and is designed for use within enterprises rather than totally replacing a mobile phone. However, Cisco is in talks with cell phone makers about the possibility of adding cell phone capability to such a device, which might carry the Cisco brand." Seems like a very limited use device, but IP telephony is getting increasingly popular.

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bandwidth issues by wilko11 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Voice traffic doesn't use as much bandwidth as you would think. One full-rate PCM voice channel is 56Kbits/sec (in North America) or 64Kbits/sec (Europe/Australia etc). IP telephones typically use compression so that the actual bandwith required can be as low as 8Kbits/sec. So even 3Mbit/sec wireless is plenty of bandwidth for these sorts of devices.

    If bandwidth does become a problem in a particular area, simply take a leaf out of the mobile phone providers book - deploy more cells in that area, with the added advantage that an 802.11 base station is much cheaper than a GSM/PCS/CDMA/Whatever microcell

  2. Re:why wi-fi isn't coming to our office anytime so by BeBoxer · · Score: 4, Informative

    The problem is that we would have to to implement more firewalls not only at each and every access point, but also at each of the computers that would access them.

    You do realize that this is not the case, correct? I mean, if you want to try to snow your users to avoid deploying wireless that's one thing. But I've got a wireless network with dozens of AP's spanning several buildings, and it does not require dozens of firewalls. It requires a small filter on the single router interface for the wireless network which limits traffic to only our VPN server. No need for a firewall at each access point. Just install a VPN client on each wireless users laptop. And if you have users who travel with laptops, you should be providing them with VPN clients or something equivalent anyway. So really, the incremental security impact of wireless can be made very low very easily.