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Vonage to Produce a WiFi Phone
EvilStein writes "Vonage is announcing plans for a WiFi phone that will allow Vonage subscribers to make VoIP calls from any WiFi hotspot. The phones are said to cost about $100. This looks to be a pretty cool setup and might rattle the wireless industry quite a bit if they pull it off." Another story notes that battery life won't be as good as existing cell phones.
Incoming calls would be no problem, just as they aren't with their modems or softphone. The phone is basically a shrunken VoIP modem with a mic and a wireless card, so I'd assume that the phone declares its IP address to Vonage Central once it logs on to the local network. Vonage then maps your local number to that IP and your on your way.
Their modems and softphone work the same way. Once they navigate the firewall they log into the Vonage servers and your number is mapped. We use both all the time internationally - we've sent modems to our European offices which has made them accessable with a local New York call, and we use the softphone on business trips to Hong Kong, which has turned a multi-hundred dollar phone bill per trip into nearly zero.
If you're involved in international business, VoIP is the biggest cost-saving measure since e-mail.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
When researching VOIP this weekend (I am thinking of nixing my home phone for a cell phone and a voip) I found that a call requires 90Kbps of bandwidth.
This depends entirely upon the codec used. 90kbps (full-duplex) would be G.711, while G.729 uses about a third of this:
http://www.terracall.com/FAQs_white_1.aspx
I haven't figured out why so many people use G.711 - voice doesn't need this much bandwidth, and we all know this from years of working with mp3.
Isn't there a port or something you could block to disable VOIP services? I don't know a whole lot about it but I assume it must use a port that could be firewalled out.
This can be very tricky. SIP uses UDP 5060 to negotiate calls, then picks variable high ports (~16000 I think) but can be run pretty much anywhere.
I have been playing with a WiFi VoIP phone from ZyXel at home for the last few weeks & the performance has been adequate. It really depends heavily on the quality of your Internet connection. Unless you have consistent ping times of 50ms and close to zero jitter to your call termination point, you won't enjoy the experience.