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Cisco to Ship Wi-Fi Phone in June
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.
How's it going to handle when I walk into Starbucks and the T-Mobile Hotspot wants me to log on? Right now, you have to authenticate using HTTP.
Surely I'm not going to have to pull up a tiny browser and enter my login information on the phone just to get online or to be able to get my incoming calls. That would be horrible.
What's your damage, Heather?
Running off a PBX inside the office?
I suppose the only different thing would be IP vs whatever phone, but most large companies would have the PBX machine handle such things, and the internal lines would still be analog...
One day you will pay one company $39.95 for flat-rate long distance .... Whenever, wherever.
Vonage currently sells VoIP service using a Cisco box for $39.95. If you had WiFI service everywhere, you could buy a WiFi router, plug in your Cisco box, plug in a phone, and have extremely ghetto "portable phone" service. With these new Cisco wireless phones and whatnot, we will fast approach true wireless VoIP.
This is where IP takes over, and voice dies. It's a good time to be Vonage, it's a GREAT time to be Cisco, and it's a horrible time to be SBC.
In Japan, companies have PHS phones that they can attach to their internal PBX, and the phones would have an internal extention but would work throughout the company even though, say, the place had different locations. It's almost like a miniture cellular network.
The reason I bring it up is because that I can't imagine the 802.11 based phones be any better than this - especially since you would need some serious WAN/VPN between facilities for the phone to work across them. added to the fact that routing and entryption takes a bite of latency, I won't imagine using them is very pleasant at all.
That's not to mention that as far as I remembered, keeping a WiFi connection alive takes magnitudes more power than cellphone technology.
Granted, PHS is not a standard in the US (I actually don't think it's anywhere else), but for this particular usage, I actually think it's pretty cool, and very suited.
btw, PHS is different from cellular in some ways though very similar. I am too sleepy to type them up. For some +informative karma, anybody want's to explain the difference?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
for right now at least?
I think this is more just a concept idea. From the article, "Customers are turning to IP telephony because it simplifies their network infrastructures and can lower costs, and a mobile IP phone would be attractive to many companies because it would let them add mobility without paying for cell phone airtime, Pratt said."
Why not just get those Nextel mobile/radio phones then? Seems like almost everyone in corp. america has a mobile phone, this cisco one would just be an extra gadget taking up pocket-space.
Anyways, I'm sure there are many other very cool possibilities with an 802.11 phone, like practical VoIP, more seamless syncing with enterprise-wide LDAP data, etc.
We've been using Symbol 802.11b handheld phones for almost 2 years.
Compared to file sharing programs, voice takes no bandwidth at all (2kbyte/sec).
BTW, did you know that phone companies use the internet for long distance calls? They first test the bandwidth and if it's fast enough, they don't set up a line but use VoIP, saving them quite some money.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
These phones are typically used in a "campus" type environment such as a University, large hotel or hospital where staff need to be mobile in a limited environment. Unlike standard digital cordless phones these phones can roam from base-station to base-station, so they have a greater effective range. And unlike cell phones they are simply an extension of the PBX so there are no airtime charges.
Many PBX vendors provide DECT options but these require you to install special purpose DECT base stations around your campus while 802.11 base stations can be used for both IP telephony and data.
We are currently in the early stages of a Cisco IP phone rollout at our college.. the technology seems very interesting yet it still has a few bugs - the Cisco 7940 phones we have are running new firmware versions but we keep experiencing irritating little gremlins with them.
:)
I am looking forward to these phones though.. as it is our employer just wont buy us mobile phones of any kind - it seems that senior management need them (on $75k salaries) but us on 1/5 of that have to use our own despite going off site and being around the building quite often. As the company is keen to explore wireless technology & ip telephony even further, these seem like a sure fire purchase!
A great idea.. no recurring phone bills, better range than radio handsets (provided we install a few hefty wireless base stations) and it ties into our existing phone system
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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
Total bandwidth globally on the spectrum isnt limited as wi-fi has a limited range. The only limit would be the DENSITY of users vs the density of access points. Areas with many simultaneous users might need several access points. You would only approach the limit if you had 50 simultaneous users per access point, and access points on all four channels used in the same area. Thats 200 users in a 100m radius, im sure we can live with it.
Yea, the wifi phone might not be able to replace mobile phones themselves. And the article does mention using them in the enterprise. Does anyone else think the phones can be a great way for IT Managers to keep in touch with home base? Most IT people I know carry pagers, so if they are around the office, the boss pages them to send 'em over to a job, but they first must call the boss up on an office phone to get the details.
By carrying this phone around, the IT person could be easily contacted and sent where needed instantly. Good idea? No?
The company I work for actually has competent (read: not clueless) people in charge when it comes to our network and company security.
sure, we get dozens of calls per day from users wanting to know when we are going to start going wireless (same people who want to know where their flat-screen lcd monitors are). 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. Since we have chemists, physicists (sic?), and biologists working here with very sensitive data on their computers as well as our servers, we cannot allow casual access to their machines as well as the centralized data on our servers.
basically, we would have to treat a wireless network within our company like the internet...which would come out to be freakishly more expensive (and slower) than the gigabit network we already have in place.
until a wireless standard arrives with encryption "out of the box", we aren't going to touch wireless. And I'll bet that more companies out there have the same thoughts about this.
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
Does anyone else find the Cisco IP phone (software) interface extremely chunky, slow, and difficult to operate? I realize they tried to go with a "real world device" metaphor there, but failed by creating a clunky and "slow" interface. :D
As mentioned in this article, such things aren't always good ideas. Apple QuickTime player is mentioned, that basically by trying to emulate a "real world" device, it has the same "real world" limitations such as only allowing to store a few bookmarks in the slide out "favorites" tray, etc.
I haven't used Cisco IP phone extensively (it striked me as slow and unresponsive and not particularly user friendly (took me a while to figure out how to go off-hook with it)), and recommended against using Cisco software for VoIP
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.
WiFi is a bad choice for voice communication. The upside is that it is free (after the initial investitions). GSM allows companies to have their own internal phone network and selectively allow workers with a correct sim card to use this internal system. The company doesn't has to pay anything, and people get to carry around their normal cellphones. If you have a Nokia phone, maybe you have wondered what this "closed user group" feature means - that's what it means. Often, these companies outsource the creation of the voice network to a normal cellphone company, and pay them a flat fee for all internal voice communication. A organisation that uses this system is CERN, and they work together with the swiss operator Swisscom. You can find a bit of inside information here.
I work at Cisco, and for a while now our IP phone infrastructure has been growing. I now have an IP phone on my desk, at home and softphone on my laptop. For those who ask 'what's so great about that?' the thing is THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME NUMBER. Not only that, but my softphone works over wireless. With my laptop, wireless card, and headset, I can take inbound calls TO MY EXTENSION anywhere on campus. My boss has softphone on his IPAQ, and gets the same deal. This appears to be just an extension of that, with a dedicated device permitting it.
Why dump the ATA-186s? They work wll for 99% of people, and in the short term almost nobody wants to go out and buy a Wifip phone.
But there's no reason they can't allow both. In fact, you can use the tech note on Cisco's site to reset the admin password on your ATA-186, grab the settings, and plug them into your new device. No skin off Vonage's nose, so I imagine they wouldn't care unless your device made trouble.
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Spectralink has had an 802.11 VoIP phone for a few years. It hands off from AP to AP totally seamlessly.
I have also used the Symbol phone. Not nearly as nice.
The reason a corp would buy this instead of a cell phone is there is no reason to take the 802.11 phone home.