[Asterisk-Users] Cost of IP Phones, or Isn't It Just Software?

[Scott Laird]

On Jun 16, 2004, at 11:18 AM, Jay Milk wrote:
> Cisco, for example, has different models such as the 7940 and 7960 
> which
> seem to only differ in the software.

IIRC, the 7940 and 7960 run the same software, but differ slightly in 
hardware.  The 60 has 6 line appearance buttons, while the 40 has 2.  
I'm not sure quite how they manage to charge $25/button for the 
upgrade. :-)

> Does this sound to utopian, or do my fellow list-members think there is
> an idea here?  How many more PBXs would you integrators sell if the 
> cost
> was down to $150/station for a business-class phone?  How many more
> features could be implemented with an open-source UA?  (Menus, Visual
> Voicemail, extended CallerID info, Call Delegation, Queue handling,
> Email, Weather, Reminders, .... )

Well, the big problem with all of this is the development costs.  Your 
$30 router is probably the 5th or 6th nearly-identical product the 
company has made, and they've probably sold millions of them.  I doubt 
most VoIP phone vendors sell more then 100,000 of even their most 
popular models, and phone vendors are just starting to be able to share 
platform code between models.

Odds are, we'll see the phone that you're looking for, but it'll take 
another three years to show up, and it'll probably come from the same 
companies that make your cheap routers and cordless phones 
today--D-Link, Linksys, VTech, Panasonic, and whoever OEMs the home 
phones that AT&T and SBC sell by the boatload.  It'll take a while for 
commodity VoIP phones to appear.  I mean, even 12 months ago, it wasn't 
completely clear that SIP was going to win.  And you can't have 
commodity hardware without ubiquitous standards.

> Could this be financed?
> - I don't think it would take that much -- maybe $10K - $20K to 
> purchase
> samples and development hardware and software.  Engineers could donate
> time in exchange for revenue shares later.  A small investment would be
> counted toward a purchase of a finished product, a large investment
> would buy you a share in the company.  200 active members in this list
> donating $100 each could get a handful of engineers on their way.

My gut instincts say that you're low by at least an order of magnitude. 
  The hard part isn't really designing the basic code.  The hard part is 
building the user interface and doing all of the design work.  I mean, 
go take a look at really good consumer electronics devices (TiVo comes 
to mind).  Spend some time looking at how well they work, and then 
compare them to even the best OS interfaces (KDE?).  You can't really 
design good interfaces by committee.

On the other hand...  Go take a look at all of the ~$100 wireless 
router/firewall/print server/gateway boxes on the market, and you'll 
see one thing that almost all of them have in common: they all run 
Linux.  Most of them are even based on the same small number of tools; 
things like busybox and uclibc.  If you want to see cheap, powerful 
VoIP phones, think about what they really need in terms of software, 
and then set out to write it and license it so the phone companies can 
incorporate it into their products.  I'm kind of amazed that FXS ports 
aren't standard on medium-end home routers right now; they'd probably 
only add $5-10 to the cost of the router, *IF* they had the software 
and felt like the demand was there.


Scott