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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 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 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.
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
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
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.
...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
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.
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.
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.