4. Access Devices

Relatively inexpensive VoIP access devices that let you use your normal phones with VoIP (called ATA's - Analog Terminal Adapters) or attach to a USB port and use your computer to link to the VoIP world have been available for some time. But you usually had to accept buying products from unknown or lesser-known companies. But now that companies like Linksys and NETGEAR have started to ship VoIP products, you can get (relatively) low prices and the comfort of dealing with names that you know. The entry of the "big boys" into VoIP and the volume they will bring will help continue to drive prices down and product selection up.

Linksys had a small pod in Cisco's modestly-sized booth, showing their RT31P2 VoIP router, but probably wouldn't have been there at all, had it not been for the fact that parent Cisco has plenty of other VoIP wares to sell.

The only other familiar consumer name was Zoom, who was showing its recently introduced ZoomTel ADSL X5v and V3 VoIP routers. The SIP-based ADSL X5v comes in two flavors for ADSL over normal and ISDN lines and combines a 4 port SPI / NAT router, ADSL modem with a single VoIP FXS port for analog phone connection. The product includes PSTN (normal telco) failover in the event of power loss and curiously defaults to using the PSTN for normal calling (you prefix a number with "#" to make a VoIP call).

Zoom bundles their Global Village VoIP service (provided through Level 3) that provides free connectivity to SIP users. You can, of course, upgrade to a paid "enhanced" service that provides PSTN calling, but you're also free to use any other free or paid SIP-based service since Zoom doesn't lock their product to its service. The V3 router does everything that the X5v does, but has an Ethernet WAN port instead of built-in ADSL modem. Retail for both products is around $99 and the X5v is available now with the V3 hitting retailers within a week or so.

Although not so much a consumer name due to its focus on selling to service providers, ZyXEL had its own room where it was showing its entire VoIP product line including the Prestige 2000W VoIP Wi-Fi phone, P-2002 and P-2002L ATAs and Prestige 2602HW Series 802.11g Wireless ADSL VoIP IAD.

Lesser-known (at least outside the VoIP community) companies such as Signal Communication, Clipcomm and Grandstream were showing both access devices and phones. These companies don't really have a retail focus and sell mainly to service providers, so my conversations with folks on booth duty tended to be brief.

South Korea-based Clipcomm's line of ATAs and gateways support both H.323 and SIP natively, but can have their firmware flashed to support MGCP, MEGACO / H.248. The CG-100 and CG-200 single and dual-channel ATAs both have an "E" version that supports adding an 11b wireless card that can support connection of wireless clients to it or wireless connection of it into a WLAN. The four-channel CG-400 and CG-410 gateways don't support this wireless option, but provide four FXS or four FXO (phone line) ports respectively.

Grandstream was showing its newly-announced HandyTone 386 ATA and HandyTone 488 IAD devices, which are slated for "Beta" release next month at suggested lists of $89 and $99, respectively. The 386 features dual FXS ports, each of which can support independent SIP accounts. The 488 has one each FXS and FXO ports as well as Ethernet WAN and LAN ports.