Scott and SymPhone (VoIP via WiFi)
Once again, I'm almost physically connected to my computer tonight looking at wireless stuff. It's pretty late but I wanted to share some discoveries.
First, Scott Loftesness has a bunch of other blogs that he writes about wireless technologies! I had no idea... I've been reading his site for months now for both his technical and market views and his observations from "home" in San Francisco. But he also has several other sites and sections including the Bluetooth Weblog, Digital Identity category, Mobile Commerce category, and Payment Industry News Weblog (where you can find out a bit more about Scott and his partners). Very nice.
The other thing is an article over at 802.11 Planet about a company called TeleSym and their product called the SymPhone, which is a program for PocketPCs allowing them to make VoIP calls over a WiFi connection. It's a very cool idea. I'm not sure how practical it is right now since you'd have to be hot and heavy into both WiFi and PocketPCs in order to find this useful, but the concept is what gets me. It's a cool idea that's been demonstrated to work:
...
Given the network load, the latency of any WLAN network and the inevitable packet loss due to the presence and use of conventional 2.4GHz cordless phones, the quality of the voice calls were shockingly good.
To make all this happen, the SymPhone system uses three parts: the SymPhone Client; the SymPhone Call Server; and the 3Com NBX 100SymPhone Connector in a bundle called the SymPhone NP so you can use the company PBX to make calls to the outside world using your Wi-Fi PocketPC. If you just want to use the PDA just for phone calls within the company, you can use just the SymPhone N package.
This stuff is all very cool. But I have this feeling I'm at least a year behind the curve on all this stuff. I'm sure there's many wireless experts who, if they read my weblog, are yawning and/or laughing at my attempts to catch up and do something cool.
-Russ
Later... Following links around and putting two and two together, it seems that Scott's son David is president of cool looking company called Blue Mug who I've seen advertised both on Scott's Bluetooth weblog and other places. Very interesting.