SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Bye Bye Home Phone

June 23, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Bye Bye Home Phone

TAGS: SMB Hardware

Well, it's official: I'm switching to all-VoIP at home. Linksys was kind enough to send me their new WIP330 Wireless-G IP Phone, and so far I can't get enough.

It's a pretty simple $220 (street) device with a lot of room for feature improvement, but what's making me gush about it is that it manages to do two things right: (1) I have no trouble connecting to wireless APs and hotspots. WEP, no WEP, whatever, the Linksys finds it and establishes link. (2) And this is probably a function of the SIP provider as much as anything--voice quality is killer. Except for the occasional hiccup, folks can't tell I'm on anything other than my standard home phone.

On the feature side, it does pretty well for a first-time device. The display is nicely sized and bright, it's got great WiFi range and it can (supposedly) support QoS settings--I still have to test that. A few of the features need some maturation: The embedded Web browser, for example, is way too kludgy to use. It should be better optimized for this device, and the pointing device control needs a re-think. Steal Apple's engineer if you can't think of anything else. A few smart Web site choices wouldn't hurt either--like a direct link to the support page for the phone would be good. A decent typepad would be nice--if there was ever a device that's going to go nuts with text message this is it. Sticking with the standard phone keypad is nuts. And Linksys should setup an atomic date/time server somewhere and let the phone sync to that over the Web.

All minor dings, 'tis true, but dings nonetheless. Still, the phone is overall a winner in my book.

Best part is that using a SIP provider like BroadVoice I'm looking at about $20/mo for pretty much unlimited nationwide calling. And that includes all the fancy stuff (voice mail, caller ID, three-way calling, call forwarding, etc.).

Yeah, if my cable modem takes a dive, this thing does too. But that's happened exactly twice in the last six years and I've got my cell phone as backup. So far, no downside.

Should SMBs think about this? Definitely. This is an amazing cost saver for smaller companies, especially startups. Larger companies probably want to consider such a move more carefully, but fully outsourced SIP call managers are available and they do offer a number of benefits.

Posted by Oliver Rist on June 23, 2006 09:09 AM

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