[asterisk-users] [OT] Wifi SIP phones - LinkSys WIP330

[Gordon Henderson]

On Thu, 28 Dec 2006, Wayne wrote:

> Hi List,
> Hope everyone is recovering from the festive season :) (ok we still have new 
> years i guess!)
>
> Anyways, I was wondering if anyone has had any successful dealings with WiFi 
> phones and operation with '*' at all?

I've been using an UT Starcom F1000G for a while now, and so-far so good.

It has a bit of a "toy" feel to it - monochrome display, but actually, it 
seems to do what it says it does on the back of the packet, and it's 
battery life is amazing! (3 days on standby) There is a higher grade model 
in a clam-shall design with a colour screen, but as far as I could tell (a 
friend has one) it has exactly the same functionality as the "bar" one I 
have.

It does occasionally lose contact with the base station, but it also has a 
(good!) knack of finding open access points (when I've been quite 
surprised to hear it's connection beep go off in my pocket, and then had 
the ability to make calls through it to my office * server!)

I'm not sure I'm quite ready to recommend it to my paying customers yet, 
but thats probably because they are using rubbish WiFi systems. (I'm not a 
fan of WiFi, but after building a few community broadband systems out of 
it will tolerate it!)

> Would I be correct in thinking that (as long as the relevant ports were 
> open on the firewall) it would be possible to still be an extension to * 
> if you could access the internet from, say, a wifi hot spot that was not 
> a part of the lan?

The F1000G will talk to a STUN server to get round NAT, so as long as the 
router that hot-spot is connected to isn't doing any real firewalling, 
just NAT, it "just works" ...

I've been able to enter WEP and WPA keys into it through the keypad, 
without too much difficulty - I guess it would be much easier if you were 
an SMS junkie though (my mobile phones have always been Nokia 
communicators with a qerty keyboard for sending messages, so I've never 
really gotten into using the numbers pad to compose text or search the 
contacts list!)

The one down-side is that if you are connecting to an AP that has a web 
based front-end to let you enter your usenrame/password or credit card 
details (eg. BT OpenWallet) then you're stuffed as it doesn't have a web 
browser.

Gordon