- Tim Higgins: The upbeat mode that prevailed at the show was helped along by FCC chairman Michael Powell’s keynote on Tuesday. The speech garnered plenty of press from the snappy quotes just made for us media types to slurp up. But Powell’s basic message—that any US government regulation of VoIP should be applied with a very light touch—was consistent with his previous pronouncements on this topic.
- Voice Over Wi-Fi Hits VON: Net2Phone announced the first product in its suite of wireless VoIP solutions for service providers: the VoiceLine XJ100 Wi-Fi Handset. Startup DiamondWare Ltd. has announced the Wi-Fone product, a SIP-based softphone for PocketPC, which will be available via its partner, Voiceworks. Xten also released its new PocketPC softphone, X-PRO v2.2.
- Martin Geddes: There’s a lot of confusion at the conference when people say “VoIP”. You have to work hard to understand whether they mean slot-in PSTN replacement using phone numbers, or just any real-time duplex audio stream over IP. One of the best things the regulators could do is introduce some new terms and people will, by necessity, start to use them.So if you’re putting your pension savings into the VoIP business, tread very, very carefully. This boom going to hurt as bad as the .com explosion. One way or another, there’s going to be a lot of roadkill, and a lot of get-rich-quick money from inflated promises.
VoWiFi is hot and will be hotter in 2005 as secondary (i.e. beyond WEP) authentication becomes part of the handsets logic.
I’m set to get some VoWiFi phones from BroadVoice and Net2Phone next week to try agains VoicePulse and the Zyxel phones (they are basically using the same phone with possibly modified firmware).
I have the VoicePulse already working in the house and find the sound qualuty of the WiFi phone to be like cellphone circa 1982.