Your Phones

Your Phones
True, many phones in homes today are wireless. (And, of course, cell phones
are, too.) But remember that your wireless home network uses the same 2.4
GHz and 5.8 GHz wireless frequencies that your cordless phones do. And
when you factor in that your neighbor’s phones and a bunch of other devices
in home are also on these frequencies, the throughput and usability of your
wireless home networking system can get watered down pretty fast.
Enter your whole home 802.11 network. It makes sense to migrate your cordless
phones, for instance, to your home wireless network so that your wireless
phones won’t compete and interfere with your home wireless network; instead,
you can get 802.11-based phones that ride over the same network in a very
seamless way. (Chapter 2 has all the details about the 802.11 protocol.)
To do this, you will need to get an 802.11-enabled phone, which would work
exactly like a cordless phone. In fact, you scarcely could tell the difference
between the two. There are only a few such phones available today, and they
are fairly pricey, but soon, you’ll probably see a lot more home telephone
products that support 802.11. You might also see 802.11 technology bundled
inside your cell phone as well, although the early moves with cellular have
focused on Bluetooth enablement, which we talk about in Chapter 15.
You can find 802.11b-based business phones today from Symbol Technologies
(www.symbol.com) or SpectraLink (www.spectralink.com), but these are
more business class products and require business telephone gear and VoIP
(Voice over IP) gateways to work. We estimate that it will be a few years
before these get to the price points that you’d pick one up at RadioShack or
CompUSA. Expect to see your cell phone sporting an 802.11b/VoIP capability
sometime in the next few years, too.
You can still use your wireless network and broadband connection to make
low-cost phone calls. With a Cisco (www.cisco.com) ATA-186, which is a twoport
analog telephone adapter that turns traditional analog phones into IP
phones, you can place calls to any of a number of VoIP telephone companies
(like www.vonage.com) that will carry your calls to their destination for low
rates (less than the traditional long distance carrier rates for sure). Unlimited
calling services like Vonage (www.vonage.com) take your normal ordinary
phones and connect them to a special device, like the Cisco ATA-186, that
allows you to place phone calls over IP networks, like your home wireless
LAN and the Internet.
Just plug your cordless phone into the Cisco adapter and call away. You can
also make calls over your laptop with software from companies like
Net2Phone (www.net2phone.com); Net2Phone also has a strong line-up of
hardware for VoIP calling.
Although the ATA-186 is not wireless itself yet, we expect it (or a similar model)
to be so shortly. In the meantime, if you need to, you can get your ATA-186 onto
your wireless network with a wireless bridge, such as the D-Link DWL-810+
(www.d-link.com), which we use with gaming devices in Chapter 12.