Cisco to Ship Wi-Fi Phone in June

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday April 18, 2003 @12:08AM 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.

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Re:Bandwidth issues by wilko11 · 2003-04-18 00:34 · 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