Rodent Regatta

Voice over IP is the wave of the future. Think about every small office you know about. They have some type of phone system with several phone lines coming into the office. For each of those lines they pay the traditional phone company’s ”business line rate.” Often that number approaches $50 per phone line.

Now picture the day when that small office replaces its existing phone system with one that is capable of handling calls via ”VoIP” – that’s voice over internet protocol. In other words, they beef up their Internet bandwidth slightly and connect an IP phone system to it. No more $50 per month per phone line.!

Clearly, the next step is wireless. Add an 802.11X wireless capability in the office and, using these technologies, an iPAQ becomes a cell phone! Glenn Fleishman picked up this story.

Form of iPaq, Shape of PSTN: Telesym offers an interesting product that turns a PocketPC, like an iPaq, into a PDA-to-PDA to PDA-to-PSTN (publicly switched telephone network) portable phone. It works over standard 802.11b networks, and requires a gateway to add the phone capability. The trend continues.

David Isenberg has seen a similar capability. He talks about it in issue #77 of his (excellent) newsletter.