Tue, 11 Feb 2003

Rendezvous with a Telephone
What a write up in Business Week via MacCentral and Slashdot about the potential for Apples new zero configuration network technology called Rendezvous.

I've used it, and it is pretty cool stuff. But the article, in typical biz mag fashion, jumped on a bandwagon with a 'new idea' that's been around for a while, and has always failed to catch on.

"How about using Rendezvous to power local-phone traffic inside a midsize office? Get rid of the wires. Use cheap voice-over-IP phones plugged into Macs equipped with Wi-Fi cards. No more need for inside plant specialists to check wiring or string cables to the desks."

First off, please show me a "cheap" voice over IP phone. I can by a POTS phone at Wally World for less than 5 bucks.... sure digital phones for PBX systems are expensive - but simply changing the transport will not make them any cheaper. If you're looking for cheap, and your talking computer components, you're probably talling USB. I bought a minimal USB IP handset a few months back for $49 US, and I think they were selling it at a loss as it's use required the purchase of time on their network. It was, of course, tethered to the machine by a USB cable - signifigently more expensive than a phone cord. So much for saving on wiring specialists.

And of course, Rendezvous has little if anything to do with this - you could attempt this same scenerio today over wired networks. It's been tried - and has never caught on.

If you really want to eliminate wiring, just go wireless! Buy everyone in the office their own personal cell phone. Nextel is trying desperately to sell this, with some success in certain vertical markets (construction, outside sales, etc).

Why not just have the wireless phones themselves enabled by Rendezvous? So that the phone would be essentially nothing but an Airport (or Bluetooth, etc.) device with a mic and a speaker. How much would one of those puppies cost?

The real cost of a telephone system is in the routing and reliabilty of the infrastructure - not it's physical form or underlying protocol. Even with the rapid penetration of broadband, we are still nowhere near being able to sit down at a terminal and get "net-tone" the way we can confidently pick up a phone and get dial tone. And unless everyone you want to call is on the IP network, you'll need a gateway. Those aren't cheap ($10k and up, typically).

Networks, voice over IP, software routing - all these can certainly be used to good effect for telephony. But to completely replace the existing telephone system, even for a small to midsize office, at an affordable cost... not yet.

Here's the link:

Rendezvous, Microsoft And Apple [Slashdot]

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