NEW YORK (Reuters)—Internet phone company Vonage Holdings Corp. is expected to unveil as early as Wednesday a plug-in device that will turn a computer into a phone, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The device, dubbed the V-phone, would allow users to make calls through software embedded on a memory drive that can plug into a USB slot on a laptop or desktop computer, the Journal said. The software will launch when the device is plugged in.

The phone, which is similar to products made by other companies, will launch this week and will be aimed at business travelers, said Vonage Chairman Jeffrey Citron, according to the Journal.

The product will cost $40, excluding promotions, and will be available to people who have signed up for a Vonage calling plan, the Journal said, citing a person familiar with the situation.

Vonage was not immediately available for comment.

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Chip giant Intel is offering a voice over IP add-in board as part of its push to sell motherboards.

The firm is also bundling Nvidia products with two of its motherboards - ” Hell’s Canyon” and “White Salmon” - as part of this channel push.

The Slick Mountain card, also known as the 600SM, comes with an Intel installer with drivers and ISP diallers. Customers have been told it will work with standard phones, whether they’re wired or not, and supports Counterpath, and Skype.

Intel said that it is in the process of striking deals with Vonage, Skype, Packet 8, with Delta Three and other firms.

The “Hell’s Canyon” motherboard, known as the D925XHY, is being bundled with the Nvidia 6200LE Turbo Cache 16MB card, while the “White Salmon”, or D945WPM, comes with the same options. Intel describes these as special offers for its partners.

Separately, Intel Capital the venture capital arm of the chip giant has also formed a partnership with ISP Pipex, called Pipex Wireless. The new wireless operator will provide broadband services in major metropolitan areas, the two firms said.

“We see creation of this new wireless service provider as an incredible opportunity to provide new services to major cities in the UK,” said Peter Dubens, PIPEX executive chairman. “With a wireless service, Pipex Wireless will offer broadband access and services that are very complementary to Pipex’s existing business of DSL access, hosting and network access.”

http://www.itweek.co.uk/crn/news/2154581/intel-grows-voice

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That’s a converged networks wiring closet, from enterprise networks solutions provider Foundry Networks.

According to an article in Network World, the temperatures in wiring closets typically used for IP phone AP power supplies can be so high as to be risky.

The problem is that in the typical wiring closet, you’ve got PoE (Power over Ethernet) switches to light up the phones as well as to support Ethernet traffic; UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) equipment to allow switches to run during a power outage, and the fact that all this equipment in a confined space produces a cumulative heat effect.

The article quantifies this effect. Start with a product such as Cisco’s non-PoE 24-port Catalyst 3750 LAN switch. That generates 176 BTUs of heat per hour.

Then if you add the PoE option, the switch will spike up the BTU burn rate to 534 BTUs of heat per hour.

But wait. What about the UPS? That adds another 80 to 100 BTUs of heat per hour, in a small space at that.

“In certain climates, you could have very high humidity, with the ambient temperature getting above [104 degrees],” Patrick Ferriter, vice president of marketing for IP PBX maker Zultys tells Network World’s Phil Hochmuth.

Sounds bad enough, but depending on your set-up inside that wiring closet, things could get even worse for you.

“If you have an IP PBX which has built-in gateways, and if you have a lot of analog connections — FXS boards that provide ring voltage — it could start to get even hotter,” Ferriter tells Hochmuth. “It’s going to be hotter than a traditional key system for sure.

“There are places where it does get hot,” Ferriter adds, “and you’re going to have problems if you don’t have air conditioning.”

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As buzz continues to build over Apple’s fabled ‘iPhone,’ speculation increases that such a cell phone will eventually take advantage of voice over IP (VoIP), which is projected to eventually cause serious problems for cell carriers.

According to a blog post at Innovation Analysis Group (IAG): “UK consultancy Visiongain believes that this spring Apple will launch its rumoured ‘iPhone’ - a high-end cellphone to which VoIP capability will subsequently be added. Apple and networking partner Helio are targeting the same young-consumer market as the one in which the iPod music device has been such a runaway success, according to Visiongain telecoms analyst Pam Duffey.”

Helio is an MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator. It uses another cell carrier’s network to offer its services. According to IAG’s blog, Helio has said it expects to sign up three million customers and hit the US$2 billion mark by 2009.

IAG also quoted Ms. Duffey as saying: “iPhone will probably be as disruptive to the existing carrier market as the iPod was to the mobile music industry. And when VoIP capability is added it will be even more disruptive.” VoIP is growing in the United States and the market for it could be worth as much as $3 billion by the end of the decade, according to IAG.

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If these phones from Switzerland come to fruition and get released they may be some of the cooler devices to let you roam between GSM and WiFi networks seamlessly and make VoIP calls when you’re in areas where WiFi is stronger than the cell signal.

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Seems we can look forward to a new Linksys VoIP handset by next week. The WIP300 uses any 802.11b/g Wi-Fi network, includes a POP email facility and has 1.8” color display—but it’s going to cost you. The phone runs for $250 (when was the last time you spent that much on a non-cellular phone? 1982?), which Linksys claims it has actually marked down from $300. Thanks a lot guys.

However, the point is that it looks good and supports the SIP 2 VoIP standard while being able to link up with your POP 3 and SMTP servers for email access and delivery. No word yet on price.

More Info

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Over on the Vonage Forum, there’s a thread from a Member named armresi who has been receiving a series of death-threat phone calls over his Vonage line.

Unfortunately, caller I.D. for all these calls reads “Anonymous.”

As a preventative measure, a fellow Vonage Forum Member named riddler recommends Caller ID Manager, a VoIP-compatible, $99.97 program from a company called Privacy Corps.

I’m just back from the Privacy Corps website where I learned that Caller ID Manager can:

1. Block anonymous and unidentified numbers, while allowing all others
2. Block up to 175 numbers, area codes or prefixes
3. Allow only callers you ‘Invite’ by name, number, or ‘Wildcard’ to ring your phone, and block others as you choose

You can also configure specific controls for individual numbers.
If I ever got threatened, I’d contact the police first. Then I’d consider a program such as Caller ID Manager.

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A few weeks after Mayor of Paris decided that the city needed a fiber network for universal Internet access, the city of Vienna (Austria) has announced similar plans, according to Heise.de, a German tech news publication. The city will try and get fiber connections to about 960,000 households, and hopes that the work for first 50,000 home pilot will start in February, with likely connections by this summer. The city is said to be in talks with real estate owners, the report says. The network which will be IPv6 ready will be looking to provide one gigabit per second connections. This is a trend started by folks in Amsterdam, and is clearly gaining momentum across Europe. (Hat Tip, Dirk!)

Read more

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Dutch powerhouse Phillips is poised to introduce (though only in its home base in the Netherlands for now) the VP-5500, a Wi-Fi-enabled VoIP telephone. What makes it so special? Well, it’s powered by Linux, so it’s automatically awesome. As far as features go, the VP-5500 comes with a built-in VGA camera that rotates up to 240 degrees, letting you check yourself out as you chat with a friend. Not only that, but you can hook it up to a TV and have it output a slideshow of all the photos you’ve taken. To make it future-proof, Phillips designed the phone to be updatable via Wi-Fi, opening up all sorts of neat, Linux-powered possibilities.

Read more

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I’m regularly asked to explain my scepticism of UMA and so-called “seamless” behaviour of dual-mode WiFi/cellular phones.

One of my core beliefs is that consumers will use WiFi-enabled mobile phones in a very different fashion to ordinary cellular-only handsets. They will want the WiFi function to do a lot more than simply extend cellular coverage, and offer transparent “access agnostic” links to existing mobile services.

In particular, I think consumers will want to do a lot more than access “services” with a dual-mode device. They’ll start treating the phone as a piece of home consumer electronics, rather than purely a “service-led” device. They’ll want to get MP3 files from their PC’s hard drive over WiFi, maybe share contacts, and possibly hook into all the other new bits of WiFi-enabled gadgetry around the home. They’ll want to use the phone to browse the web via their broadband connection from the sofa (with no per-MB charges), and use the integrated WiFi to access email, IM, VoIP (yeah, maybe Skype) and all that other good “proper Internet” stuff.

UMA handsets, on the other hand, will tend to usurp most of this in favour of billable operator services, just using your WiFi as a way of tunneling the (locked, walled & expensive) cellular “user experience” over broadband. On some phones you might be able to get at some of the other functions over WiFi, but only if you go down 17 levels of menus & obscure configuration settings, and your operator hasn’t locked all that stuff down.

On the other hand, UMA and its next generation, 3GPP GAN, is actually a standard, while the various approaches using SIP alternatives are more proprietary, and also tend (at the moment) to lack the much-hyped voice seamlessness which I think really isn’t that big a deal.

All of which means I was very happy to find that French broadband operator NeufCegetel appears to agree with me, and is working on a trial dual-mode solution that uses SIP and a proper PC/Internet-integrated smartphone. “Choose music, photos, videos or other documents on your computer or the Internet and load them at high speed”….

…. although maybe, just this once, they should have diverted a few pennies from their clearly very innovative R&D team, and spent a bit more on their marketing & branding efforts…. I mean, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the Qtek 8300 that NeufCegetel is using isn’t really an UglyPhone, but still, would you want to say you had a “BeautifulPhone”?

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