Early products show promise when used intelligently
Let’s play “Fill in the Product Gap”: You have Wi-Fi to connect your laptop and PDA to the Internet, and you have telephones using voice over IP. You have cordless phones and cell phones so you can walk and talk, but you don’t have cordless Internet telephones.
Consider that gap filled. Wi-Fi phones – wireless phones that connect over your data network rather than a cellular network – are becoming available for smaller buyers. Some big companies already installed Cisco Wi-Fi phones, sometimes called VoFi (I guess VoWi sounded just too weird), but those required plenty of money and technical expertise. A new wave of Wi-Fi phones aims to bring this technology down to affordable levels.
I’ve been playing with the pre-release Vonage model, which they call a Wi-Fi handset. The hardware, the F-1000 from UTStarcom, comes preconfigured for Vonage service, and these should be available for retail sale soon.
Who needs one of these phones? You already have cell phones, and many small business phone sets now come as multi-line cordless base stations with cordless handsets. Why go to the expense of buying a Wi-Fi phone on top of these?
The range of cordless phones is typically good enough for home and small offices, but not larger areas. Although wireless LAN access points don’t support greater range than cordless phones (in fact, they use some of the same overlapping radio frequencies), you can easily add extra access points to extend wireless coverage, thus extending your phone range, too, since the Wi-Fi phones use the same 802.11b or 802.11g network as your computers.
Cell phone coverage extends farther than your wireless network, but that’s a different and more expensive network. Your cell phone exists separately from your company phones, unless you use a service such as GotVMail as we discussed last time. Even then, you may have to pay for minutes or long-distance calls depending on your cell phone plan.
If you have a Vonage account already, adding the company’s new Wi-Fi phone gives you access to all the features you’re used to. And you can carry the phone with you to get calls on your Vonage number when connected to a Wi-Fi network outside the office. The Wi-Fi handset uses the same service plan as your other Vonage phones, with unlimited minutes and free long-distance calls within the United States and Canada.
This brings us to a second point: How hard are these phones to configure and use? Currently, they’re too hard, but upcoming models promise easier configuration and new features.
The Vonage handset is cell phone sized in the candy-bar configuration, meaning the phone doesn’t unfold or open (think Nokia phones). It’s as light as any of my family cell phones. The keys looked too small to be workable, but I rarely hit the wrong key.
Hitting keys accurately is crucial, because configuring the Wi-Fi handset requires typing in all sorts of network information, such as your subnet mask (255.255.255.0 in most cases, a lot of key presses) and your wireless security settings. There’s an option in the manual to download configurations from a PC, but no cable or details came with this pre-release model.
You can set up to four wireless network configurations, letting you predefine your home, business and Starbucks networks, for instance. When in range of a network, you can make and receive calls just like any wireless or cell phone.
The price is $49.95 after a $50 rebate. Vonage plans to sell the handset directly, but perhaps services will start subsidizing the costs of Wi-Fi handsets like cell phone services do their hardware. That will ease the hit on your wallet but will require obligating yourself to a contract of (probably) two years of service. If you spend more than $10 per month on long distance with a cell phone and mostly call from office locations, you can save money with the Vonage Wi-Fi handset.
Look for vendors selling computer-based IP phone systems to start including Wi-Fi handsets in their product mix. New models from ZyXel and Zultys fit well into systems, which will ease the configuration chores.
One thing will certainly happen: Cell phone services will react when enough people start buying Wi-Fi handsets. That could push total telephone costs lower, which always helps a small business.
