Review: ZYXEL P-2000W v2 VoIP Wi-Fi phone

6. Closing Thoughts

In all, I wasn't impressed with the P-2000W v2. I'll admit some of this is colored by the frustrating time I spent with the first malfunctioning phone. But even when I got a phone that worked, its performance changed depending on the wireless router that I used it with, and the quality of my transmitted voice never seemed to equal that of the person on the other end of the connection. And lest you think that these problems were due to a busy wireless LAN or poor Internet connection, I can assure you I checked both and found them trouble free with sufficient bandwidth available for the phone to use.

My sense is that the consumer market window for Wi-Fi VoIP phones is pretty much limited to gadget freaks and experimenters, since any cordless phone can be VoIP-enabled simply by plugging it into an ATA. And a big advantage of a Wi-Fi phone - working with, not against, your wireless LAN - can be achieved at considerably less expense by using 900 MHz models which, yes, are still available.

The main market for these devices are mobile users who don't find Skype suitable for their needs and enterprises looking to support mobile users on their VoIP-based company campuses. The competition for the P-2000W v2 here is big dawg Cisco's IP Phone 7920 on the (way) high end at around $600 and UTStarcom's F-1000 that can be found for around $20 cheaper than the v2.

What companies really want, however, are dual-mode Wi-Fi / cellular handsets, which continue to be just around the corner. But I think they'll stay just beyond reach until cellular carriers figure a way to get paid even when traffic is handed off to private wireless VoIP networks.

In the meantime, ZyXEL and other lower-cost WiFi VoIP handset makers need to get with the program and get at least WPA and preferably WPA2 implemented on these devices (Cisco's 7920 already supports WEP, WPA and 802.1x). While owning a VoIP phone by cracking its WEP code may not seem like a big security risk, it's the rest of the WEP "protected" WLAN that's really ripe for the picking. ZyXEL should at least implement 802.1x authentication like the Cisco and UTStarcom phones have, which would provide one more hurdle for a cracker to jump.

And while the phones are back on the design board, let's move them to 802.11g so that they can take advantage of single-chip, improved performance radios that won't cause a throughput hit to 11g WLANs. Hits to WLAN performance and security are simply too much to ask users to pay for the convenience of mobile VoIP.