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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?
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.
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
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
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
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
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.