Slashdot Mirror
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.
Right now the phone will only work in travel mode when you are connected to your own companies network. The next step would be to have a vpn client embedded in the phone, this way it can be used anywhere there is a wifi signal.
You're right in your case.
But for many, many organizations, VOIP makes perfect sense.
Many organizations have under utilized gig backbones. I know ours do. The Wan link is never enough, but the LAN backbone load never goes above 5 percent in our case.
VOIP works well in these situation; Saves a lot of money ( they're bypassing phone drops entirely in some locations ), and quality is fine.
VoIP on WiFi, seems like another story. I dunno about that :)
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Another instance of trading personal freedom and/or privacy for security?
... that would suck. The only thing that would suck worse is if I'm not being cynical enough ...
Hard to say. I mean, I live in Florida, near the capital, but you don't have to drive far in any direction to be in the middle of the National Forest (read: nowhere). If I'm driving out in the middle of nowhere, get in a wreck and end up mangled I want someone to be able to pinpoint my location if I dial 911 from my cell phone.
What if I barely have time to hit the emergency button on the phone before I lose consciousness? What if I just can't talk for some reason? What if I don't really have a clue where I am or I'm just too addled to describe the location clearly? Around here, it's really easy to be on a 50-mile stretch of road that's just trees and more trees with lots of smaller roads branching off to who knows where.
It's more a case of when and how the location technology is used than whether there should be such technology. It has life-saving uses, but as with so many other things the potential for abuse is huge, especially by an administration that considers accountability, honesty and transparency nothing more than obstacles that must be overcome.
Maybe I'm too cynical
Cisco may be able to make lots of money on corporate accounts with an initial version of this, but if IP telephony catches on, then this sort of thing will just become a commodity, sold at cut-rate prices alongside Linksys wireless gateways (with VOIP) and non-name USB 802.11b dongles.
It _seems_ costly, until you start doing some math. I know the price shocked me, too.
That $600 is one time cost. There's no recurring fees on the phone, just maintenance of the VoIP network. While that might not be cheap, it's infrastructure, and infrastructure spending is easy to justify in a case like this, where you can show clear cost savings.
A good cellular plan runs at, what, $60 or so a month in the USA. This phone is not as flexible as a cell phone, in that you can't take it everywhere and use it. But at $720 a year, a cell phone costs way, way more than this one.
But, aha! The next year, you've saved all $720 on each phone, sans the support of the VoIP network. If you've got 1000 cell phones on your company account and replace them all with VoIP phones, you've saved nearly $720,000 - let's call it $500k with VoIP support costs. That's one hell of a lot of money.
Not everyone needs the flexibility of a cell phone. If all you want is a comfortable wireless phone to use at work, this is a good deal. In fact, it has a goodly amount of potential for telecommuters, too - imagine patching your home system to your employer's VoIP system via the internet. No more phone bills to justify, auditing, etc.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
From the article: But wander from your desk long enough and chances are high that you'll come back to a telephone with that red voice-mail light glowing, meaning you've missed a call.
Oh no! You've MISSED a call! Oh, horrors! Just think, you were discussing unwinding a recursion on a whiteboard in the hallway with a coworker, doing a walkthrough of some code on the lawn, or typing up nearly 500 new lines of code in the last hour while the ringer was muted. And you MISSED a call. Your productivity was dangerously high---just think what your phone could've done to cure that!
I'll just use WiFi for email, thank you.