[Tfug] VoIP phones

[George Cohn]

TR wrote:
> I would think the question to be fundamental to what the target buyer
> would be.  A dumb phone for corporate and lock the user into our
> system.  A smart phone for openness and independence.
> 
> If this question can be answered then the issue resolved.
> 
> But I would argue in either case to design to the smart phone chips as
> because the firmware can be made to act dumb.  When smart feature are
> desired or required they can be added in with out change of the
> hardware.   This of course mean the the chip for smart does no
> preclude dumb features.  And maybe that the unit cost of chips is not
> that dramatic.
>

For years I supported a large Nortel phone network in Tucson.  The big 
players try for the first approach to lock you into buying their 
hardware to go with their switches.  Nortel actually made two different 
digital phone systems called Meridian and Norstar.  Although the phones 
looks similar, they were not interchangeable between platforms.  Then 
they went to VOIP but using their proprietary protocol called Unistim to 
lock out users from using other brands of phones.

SIP phones don't actually need any other hardware other than a network 
connection to talk to each other.  You can demonstrate this by plugging 
three cheap Grandstream phones into a network.  Once you know their IP 
addresses, you can dial each other just by "dialing" the IP address.

However, this in non-intuitive for the casual user and that's where the 
box in the middle comes into play.  Not only does if function as a sort 
of DNS translating easy to remember numbers into IP connections, it 
provides the other features like menus, voice mail, conferencing, all 
the typical features one expects from a phone.

To build a smart phone that provides all of these features again locks 
the user into your brand.  It's doable but with vendors like Nortel and 
Cisco starting to support SIP, it may hurt your market acceptance.

Just my .02 worth having worked with a lot of different brands of phone 
systems.

George Cohn