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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.
This will be a wonderful alternative for many people. Right now, the company I work for is setting up various hotspots on the selling point that you could bring in Vonage, and this will be one more great selling point. It's amazing how many people despise phone companies.
Can the phones be used to receive incoming calls? If so, how does Vonage "know" where to address the messages to? Is there a persistent forward channel giving Vonage the phone's location?
Would it be possible to get the same functionality from a PDA with wifi and a mic?
I have a similar setup at home:, much cheaper Linksys router with Vonage hooked up to 1 piece of a 2 piece portable phone. The phones are regular models (900 mhz Vtech's I believe). The piece connected to the router goes on the floor, and the other piece is easily accesssible (so I can keep 1 phone or the other charged at all times). The entire setup cost $20 and I can add more phones later if I feel like it.
I hope the vonage effort finally brings a good voip/wifi phone to the market. I have a WiSIP and so far it's been unimpressive. Flakey, difficult to configure and use, and underpowered (audio quality degrades sharply when using 128bit WEP). Lots of room in this market to make a better product!
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
The art is to simply open the ports you want to allow access on :)
"Sure, you can surf the web from my connection, but your not going to send crap through it"
liqbase
Especially since the coverage in my house is shitty. This way, cell providers don't need to worry about that, since people will be able to augment their own coverage in their own homes (they'll just have to worry about making ends meet...)
And, I believe being done in Toronto by Starnix (along with a few other cool things). Remember this?:
"That's one PDA doing the job of two desktop PCs, a notebook PC, and three telephones."
I suspect using a trimode card with any PDA\Palm\laptop you could home brew your own version of this that could pick up GSM as well.
Still, pretty interesting...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
1. Everyone with a broadband connection gets a Wifi point and make it free.
2. Everyone get a VoIP account.
3. Everyone gets free cellphone service in major metro areas and suburban areas.
4. WiMax comes out and the coverage increases by miles.
5. Both Cell phone and POTS companies go out of buisness and are replaced by a pure IP network the opperate as a messure of bandwith density as a mesure of distance from a optical fiber.
6. anti-profit
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.
Simple-- there is just so much overhead that dividing your codec bandwidth does not increase the capacity much.
In fact, if you check out this good technical presentation by Spectralink, slide 13, you will see for example that a G.711 call (64 kbps both ways, i.e. at most 128 kbps) actually utilizes 4.5% of the bandwidth in "11 Mbps" mode (i.e. in the best radio conditions). That represents 500 kbps of nominal bandwidth, to carry a 128 kbps signal.
What happens when you use the G.729 (GSM) codec at 8 kbps instead, is that the quality goes down for for sure, but the capacity does not increase that much: one call utilizes 3.5% of the bandwidth in "11 Mbps" mode, which still represents 400 kbps of nominal bandwidth.
So while you divided your codec rate by 8, sacrificing quality, the capacity has only been increased by 30%, not by 700% as one would expect in a perfectly designed system.
Why bother with lousy codecs when the underlying layer adds so much overhead in any case?
Actually, that is not correct. See rfc3261.
Sig ?
But IIRC that Philly was makeing the city one huge wifi hotspot.
Wouldn't that cripple the cellular market in philly?
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