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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.
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!).
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.
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.
...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.