VoIP on WiFi
VoIP on Wifi: Sets your mind racing doesn’t it? The confluence of both the technologies has lead to the ugliest acronyms you’ll see. VoWiFi and VoWLAN anyone? But the benefits are huge: No nasty cables to manage. To call long distance all you need to do is find the nearest hotspot, or call from the comfort of your home or office. And that’s not all. With WiFi VoIP handsets coming of age you don’t even have to use your PC.
To get started, you’ll need a good connection to the Internet. The speeds will depend on the number of people talking at the same time. The more people you have the fatter the connection needs to be. If you have just a single user, then a good dial-up account or an entry-level broadband connection should suffice.
Next you need a WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) router. Your Internet connection will terminate here and get distributed wirelessly. Make sure you use good equipment here as your call quality directly depends on it. Anything from Netgear, Linksys, D-Link or Belkin that does 802.11g will do just fine. Now that you have WiFi, you’ll need to access it from your PC or Notebook Computer. You’ll require a PCMCIA extension card to do this. Load all the drivers, and if you can connect to the Internet, we are all ready to go. What is left to do now is to select a good VoIP provider and to download the soft-phone application and get started.
Alternatively, you could buy a VoIP phone that uses WiFi. This actually is a better option as it reduces the dependency of your long distance calls on your PC. Of course, you could use a cell-phone for mobile communications, but again now you can take advantage of decreased costs while having a mobile system that offers more reliable coverage indoors and higher voice quality than traditional cellular service with VoIP and WiFi.
Though many cell-phone manufacturers like Nokia and Motorola have announced plans for dual-mode (GSM+WiFi) handsets, none of them are out on the market yet. However, phones that work purely on WiFi do exist. One of the good ones being the ZyXEL P2000W VoIP WiFi phone. Being SIP based, it will work with most VoIP providers except Skype. If you are a Skype loyalist you’ll have to wait anyway, as manufacturers are yet launch a VoIP phone.