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Cisco's Wi-Fi Phone
Forbes.com has a quick look at Wi-Fi-enabled VOIP phone. If a company deploys it in more than one location you can take the phone with you, and it acts just like the phone on your desk. Calls across the country or potentially across the ocean can be as free as a call across the office. There's also plans to incorporate support for wireless phone networks.
Information on the release date, and other info was posted on this /. posting from a two weeks ago.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I had this phone to play with at work last thursday and friday. I was very impressed with it compared to the spectralink phones we currently have. It did do a lockup/reboot on me once though. Otherwise, great phone!
Symbol had a similar product several years years ago. I believe it was called "NetVision", and at the time it ran on 2 m-bit/sec 802.11. I believe they've since updated it to run on 802.11b at 11 m-bit/sec.
That's not much more than Cisco's 7960 corded IP phone @ $500. It's a nice phone.
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Did the original poster realize that you need a Catalyst switch and a bunch of other expensive Cisco software to get this thing working?!
Granted, compared to a large scale Merdiain 1 implementation it ain't expensive, but it's not quite as simple as buying a $595 phone and a WiFi base station!
-psy
there's an RFC dealing with that exact problem.
basically what they're proposing to do is use DNS to map phone numbers to ip addresses. if your voip phone is assigned a phone number of 5125551212, you would send a dns query with an address of 5.1.2.5.5.5.1.2.1.2.e164.arpa in order to get the ip address assigned to that number. as far as i know this hasn't been implemented yet, but it's a pretty cool hack nonetheless.
I just finished a pilot VOIP install in an extremely rural area of Vietnam, about 250 km or so northwest of Hanoi, as part of a feasability study for bringing VOIP to rural areas. The system consists of a few IP phones in three locations (one of which, a high school, had no telephone at all before the VOIP install) and a couple of PCs for Internet access.
The main site has a satellite uplink and is connected to the first remote site over an 802.11b WAN link using a wireless router with a directional antenna at one end and an omni-directional antenna at the other. The first remote site is connected to the second remote site, about 200 meters away, which has a small directional antenna pointed at the omnidirectional one at the first remote site. The voice quality is outstanding, and we tested it with calls to as far away as Ho Chi Minh City, a distance of 1600 kilometers or so.
The initial cost of the equipment (Cisco VOIP gateway and call manager), a layer 3 fast ethernet switch, the satellite equipment, the IP phones, etc., looks expensive, but when you compare that to the cost of running landlines over nearly vertical mountains to a place that is an hour's drive over dirt roads from the nearest town big enough to even have lodging, you can see that if such a project is expanded from pilot program to full deployment, the costs scale very well. Even if a POTS network used microwave links over the mountains and only needed a wired network locally, the cost of building that wired network and putting up the microwave towers over the mountains would at least equal the cost of the a VOIP network with satellite uplink, and probably exceed it.
Once the one-time costs are over, operating a wireless VOIP network in such an area would certainly have a lower running cost than operating a POTS network. I wish we had had Cisco's new wireless IP phones available for the install instead of the wired ones we used. Just not having to install ethernet cabling and surface conduits in concrete-walled buildings would have saved us at least a full day's work, which would have recovered the higher cost of the wireless AP and NICs compared to the cost of a cheap switch, cable, and wired NICs.
In short, 802.11b IP phones are a significant and very promising development that will offer a significant cost savings over both POTS networks and wired Ethernet networks in remote locations.