VoWiFI Handsets from Samsung

I spent part of my day at Supercomm yesterday looking for Voice over Wi-Fi handsets. A few have been announced, such as the Prestige 2000W from Zyxel and Motorola's -- the one that Vonage is going to ship before the end of the year.

But I wondered whether there were any companies with shipping products today. Leave it to Samsung to have quietly released a terrific product. Called the WIP-5000M you can only get this handset in Italy today. But I was told by Gavin Bruce, a VP with Samsung US, that this beautiful device would be coming to the US by October.

Unfortunately the WIP-5000M is designed with a proprietary set of extensions to the SIP standard, insuring that it will only work with Samsung 802.11b base stations. A follow-on product, the WIP-6000, is due out next year with an open SIP software stack.

There will be two options for you to use the WIP-5000M. The industrial strength option is called OfficeServ and provides a combined TDM/VoIP PBX system.

Alternately, a SoHo market product, the SIT200EM, will be available in the US in October, providing 2 analog trunk lines and running embedded linux. Multiple WIP-5000M devices can be used simultaneously through a single "SoHo Master" base station.