Reinventing the landline

Enterprises have several choices when it comes to telephony. IP phones sit on many office desks, but dual-mode voice-over-IP handsets and cellular-only offerings are becoming more common. Hardware vendor Linksys believes in the continued viability of landline phones and is counting on Wi-Fi connections to stay relevant.

At this month's VON.x show in San Jose, Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems and the other patent holder for the name iPhone, unveiled an 802.11g iPhone for service provider mass deployment. The WIP310 iPhone offers VoIP connectivity via Wi-Fi Internet access, and it is the first Linksys phone to use session initiation protocol implementation and provisioning software. The phone is designed to mesh wireless connectivity with IP telephony.

Sherman Scholten, director of voice product management for Linksys, said that while there is a huge market for phones that support cellular technology, stand-alone Wi-Fi phones make up a sizable sector worth investing in.

“There are applications for this product where a dual-mode cell phone plus Wi-Fi aren't quite appropriate,” Scholten said. “That might be where it is used in a business place that people don't need to take their phone with them — they just use the mobility of the IP system in the office. Or people who just use the phone around their house have no need for dual-mode Wi-Fi phones. Given the state of the technology of dual-mode Wi-Fi phones and the nature of the business models around their availability, having a phone on the market that can be freely configured over any IP service is also a benefit to users.”

Linksys is looking into hotspot technologies, but for now the company is focused on the home and office space — away from hostile environments and those that require SSL identification, Scholten said. This is the first Linksys phone to incorporate the mass provisioning technology gained from the acquisition of Sipura Technology in 2005.