John
Todd jtodd@loligo.com
2003-10-03
http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/WiSIP/
Pictures:
http://www.loligo.com/asterisk/misc/WiSIP/pictures
The
first 802.11 phones to hit the "popular" commercial market were
introduced by Jeff Pulver's company, Pulverinnovations.com a few weeks ago at
the VON 2003 Fall show. While
there are other 802.11 phones, this is the first one runs SIP that I have seen
that is actually available and taking orders. The Cisco 7920 doesn't support SIP yet, but rumors have it
working by the end of the year (though the $500-$600 pricetag will discourage many
buyers.)
General
Summary:
I like
it. For the first revision, it's
quite nice, and works more-or-less as advertised. Still a lot of work in the software side of things before I
would try to sell this to anyone who wasn't a "power VoIP user"
though. In it's current state, I
would say that this is phone is great for someone who understands networking,
SIP, and wireless. Don't give it
to your mother, unless she has her own Asterisk iPBX running in the basement.
Physical
characteristics:
The
phone is extremely lightweight, and feels almost like a "demo" phone
with no real innards. The battery
is surprisingly small, and I'm going to be interested to see how it fares over
the next few months as I charge/discharge the Li-ion battery vigorously. The screen is fully-addressable, which
leads to decent graphics and text.
When the phone is idle, a very big clock appears on the screen.
The
menus are fairly straightforward, even though it takes some time to configure
the phone the first time around.
There is a TFTP option for configuration, though I was only given the
most basic of instructions on how to get that to work. The best method to configure the phone
is via the built in web server, which allows configuration of more options than
what are visible in the screen-based configuration tool.
To reset
the phone to "default" configuration, there are two options: hold the
green/red buttons during boot, or hold the "menu" and red buttons
during boot.
Annoyances:
- it takes 4 seconds to even start
dialing a number if the phone is in "keyboard lock" mode. You have to press "#" for two
seconds, and then wait another 2 seconds while it says "keyboard
unlocked!" Yes, yes, I know
the @#%@#$ keyboard is unlocked, LET ME START DIALING.
- The system only supports MSIE on
Windows platforms for a browser.
It fails outright when trying to upgrade the software on anything other
than that combination, which is really irritating to those of us that don't
have Windows systems because of such stupidities. The TFTP upgrade option doesn't work.
- The clock has some problems - either
the NTP implementation they have is broken, or their timezone offset concept is
broken. My clock randomly changes
hours, but the minutes are always right on the button.
- There is no support for passwords
under Asterisk. I have a patch
waiting for me to see if this gets fixed, but I need a Windows machine to
upload...
- Currently there is no support for
message waiting (NOTIFY) updates.
- battery life is questionable. I have left the phone for as little as
6 hours to find it lifeless on my desk after a 10 hour charge.
- there is no automatic detection of
SSIDs, nor is there any way to match SSID's with WEP passwords, nor is there
any way to get a list of available SSID's. This is a major problem for anyone who moves the phone
outside of their limited wireless coverage in the home or office. It would be ideal if there was an
SSID-to-WEP password matching list somewhere inside the brain of the device, or
even better, if it could pull that data down when it boots (from the TFTP
server)
- Wireless scares the heck out of me
from a security perspective. Some
type of encrypted download of configuration data is absolutely needed, since
TFTP has no encryption of any kind.
SIP passwords are sent in cleartext during reboots. Bad, bad, BAD. Even worse would be WEP passwords with
SSIDs sent across. Hoo boy, that
would be bad news. A quick
shared-key cipher would work if it had adequate key length.
- The phone is too light, and does not
seat itself well in the charging base.
Often, the phone will just drain itself sitting in the charge base
because the spring-loaded metal fingers that should be hitting the bottom of
the phone are not fully engaged.
This could be solved with a positive-grip snap-to-fit method on the
charger bse.
- The phone gets fairly hot when in
operation. No worse than a normal
cell phone, I suppose, but certainly warm enough to make one's hand sweat more
than usual.
- No signal strength indicator, just a
binary "yes/no" for wireless connectivity
- Default codec is G.729 (maybe should
be G.711?)
- Always uses the proxy server for media
and SIP transmissions. For
Asterisk users, this is not a big deal, but this might be more of a pain for people
with "normal" SIP proxies.
You cannot leave that field blank, or the phone will not work.
- A few Engrish problems with strange
grammatical syntax (to be expected in any 1st rev item from Asia)
- Manual is almost non-existant. The copy I received was simply
fan-folded paper with descriptions of each menu in the phone. These menus were not explained, just
drawn. So, really, there was no
manual. Howver, I expect this to
change with better production versions of the phone.
- the "vibrate" ring option is
fairly difficult to detect through clothing. They need to make the counterweight on the motor a little
more offset to get it to shake around more.
- backlight is weak. It's fine in total darkness, but in dim
situations it's still hard to read if one's eyes are not totally adjusted to
have a fully open pupil.
Plusses:
- The manufacturer was very willing to
work with me on some problems I encountered. This shows promise, since most equipment manufacturers will
force you to go through the reseller, who could usually care less about your
problems. I expect Jeff Pulver
will probably handle software issues better than most resellers, but I hate
layers of indirection between myself and the person that can solve the problem,
since with the additional layers comes mis-translation of request and slower
replies.
- The phone is TINY. For a first rev, they did very well in
the form factor area. I had it in
my shirt pocket and completely forgot about it.
- Ringer has a nice auto-escalate volume
feature
- Phone supports 64 and 128 bit WEP in
the first revision (yay!)
- It works. (don't laugh - you'd be surprised how many demos I have
received which simply fall apart when used in a situation outside the lab.)
To be
Tested:
- I have not worked with it behind a NAT
yet successfully. Experiments
behind several access points failed miserably, and I had to switch to an 802.11
bridge to get the system working correctly. Vendor claims that the system supports the Via: header NAT
trick, but I have yet to test.
- I don't know what the max distance is
on the phones. I had it working
about 150 feet away, through a concrete brick wall and down at the bottom of my
driveway (a steep hill, so the signal was at "ground level")
- It has a mini-microphone/headphone
jack, like most standard cell phones.
This is very handy, since I hate having phones squashed up against my
head.
For
you rabid marketing types:
Jeff
Pulver is importing quite a few of these, and I'm sure would be happy to talk
to you about reseller arrangements.
Don't expect price breaks until you are buying >100 units,
though. The vendor told me that
they will only be taking orders of 1000 units at a time, so if you have very
deep pockets I'm sure they'll be happy to talk to you. So, for the time being, just buy them
from Jeff at the $250 listed price, though I expect in the future this price
will descend as competitors enter the market. Viva SIP!
http://www.pulverinnovations.com/wisip.html