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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!!"
Phones without cords? What is this world coming to?
I wonder if it's compatible with this phone?
-Colin
Colin Davis
Finally the time has come for affordable IP phones (as Cisco announced a $130 desktop IP phone as well). The technology to make all this useful has been developed over the last couple of years, and as much as this is being touted for the enterprise, it will impact the consumer market as well. I'm already using a Cisco 7960 hooked up to my DSL, using a SIP enabled router (Intertex IX66) to call people all over the world (for free!).
I for one welcome the day that VoIP can be a reality,
but let's face it, with the ammount of data that it requires, a WiFi enabled VoIP call would just eat up the bandwidth that others need to use to do their work. let's focus on bringing sellular technology to the IP network, rather than the other way around.
Moo.
Will this have any impact on traditional phone companies?
I was wondering when somebody was going to invent a kind of "Mobile Phone". Imagine being able to make calls from whereever you like? Its an amazing idea - I can throw away my 100 ft telephone extension cable now! I hope these "Mobile Phones" catch on!
What they need to do now is create a hybrid cell/wi-fi/VoIP phone with bluetooth that can auto-sense where it is in relation to your desk and/or office building.
When at your desk, your wired desk phone rings. When in the hallway/bathroom/break room, your wireless phone rings. When outside the building, calls are forwarded to your cell number on the same device.
You would be able to customize each of the 3 zones (office, building, world) with its own call-handling rule set. Higher-end models would also auto-sense when you were in the bathroom, so you could avoid those embarrasing moments without thinking twice.
"The devices will start shipping in June with a list price of about $595 a handset."
;)
Wow, that's a costly phone..
"Sir, I think that we can save the company money by NOT buying those expensive phones and just letting employees actually return their voicemails when they get to the office. No need to spend $595 per phone just to bug people when they're on lunch!"
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!
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.
I use vonage business VoIP services. I have calls drop and poor sound quality as is, now if I brought the unpredictability of Wi-Fi connections into play, it would only get worse.
VoIP is still not a complete solution, at least not for reliable service just yet, IMHO. Unless you go with a dedicated network. Services like vonage are affordable, but they use the net and are vulnerable to the usual traffic issues, etc...
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.
Sometimes that's the whole idea.
The coolest voice ever.
I just can't help to wonder if IP phones will be the driving force behind IPv6. Millions of phones need their IP numbers. Of course it can be used with NATs and VPNs, but a real IP number would make much more sense.
J.
TM
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That's not much more than Cisco's 7960 corded IP phone @ $500. It's a nice phone.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I think it'd be kinda cool to have VOIP networks at the office that yield more insntantaneous communications.
Right now my company's building a couple of systems and we've got ppl running around all over the place. It's hard to reach people at their desks. It'd be kinda cool if we had a form of walkie talkie with a list of ppl we wanna talk to on it, tap their name and start talking. Beats using cell phones, plus we only bug the particular person we wanna bug. (as opposed to having broadcast convos over a walkie-talkie...)
It's not something we'd spend a whole lotta money on right now as it's not solving that big of problem (small office...) but if we did have it it'd be a huge help. I'd like to call over to the guy in charge of the database just to ask a quick question rather than run to the other side of the office with the error message I'm seeing memorized.
Well I can dream.
"Derp de derp."
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
Scenario
1. The router (or gateway or something) dies so no email. Ok, I'll use the phone. Whoops.
2. Have a fire that knocked out power, got to call the FD. Whoops.
I'll wait.
Nate
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.
...at least 7 states:
Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Virginia
if not more later this year or next:
Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
Check out http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/superdmca.html for status updates.
For Tennessee activities against this bill see: The Tennessee Digital Freedom pages
Your complaints about being offended offend me.
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.
The real market for these things is in the home. I would love to junk my crappy cordless phones and use 802.11-speaking phones on my existing wireless network. Not only would that reduce the number of boxes I have to plug in, but if it caught on it could really help reduce the persistent interference problems between 2.4GHz cordless phones and 802.11 networks.
But most people aren't going to want to run (and rely on) a PC 24/7 just to be able to make phone calls -- much less a dedicated Cisco VoIP server! And tunneling through some server on some distant network isn't going to work either, given the extra latency and decreased reliability that will introduce.
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.
Spoke H.323 and allowed you to call by IP addr as well as by E.164 address. Spoke 802.11b.
So, this isn't really a new idea. Just Cisco's edition.
Poof.