The overall performance of the 7920 phone was excellent, exceeding all the other products in both voice quality and range. Voice quality was very clear and the systems did not pick up as much background sound as other products we tested. The 7920 was the only phone able to maintain high-quality sound in spite of the large percentage of out-of-order packets that we threw at it. We walked out of AP range for more than 60 seconds and were able to walk back in and continue our call. We had to verify with a Cisco representative that nothing sneaky was happening to maintain the call.
Although Cisco's phones are easy to recommend, they are expensive. At a retail cost of $595, they were the most expensive of any product tested. In addition, you will need to factor in the cost of CCM infrastructure as well as CCM client licenses.
Cisco Wireless IP Phone 7920, $595. Cisco Systems, (800) 877-0519. www.cisco.com
SpectraLink is the current voice over WLAN market leader and it's easy to see why. Its systems are mature and cost-effective, and they can be easily integrated into an existing PBX or Centrex phone system (both analog and digital options are available). At the same time, SpectraLink products have a certain industrial quality to them. Their system components are generic black boxes, and management requires use of an ASCII menu/command-line interface rather than a Web interface. In addition, we had some rather strange experiences upgrading firmware and dealing with battery incompatibilities, and we experienced intermittent failed-connection problems during our initial tests.
SpectraLink's strategy is not to replace your existing PBX, which Cisco proposes, but rather to provide WLAN connectivity into your existing telephony infrastructure. The product line consists of 802.11b wireless phones, the NetLink Telephony Gateway and the NetLink SVP (SpectraLink Voice Protocol) Server. The gateway is a 13-inch-wide box that serves as the link between wireless phones and your legacy telephony environment. The box we received was equipped with Ethernet, analog PBX and serial console interfaces, as well as two RJ-45 ports that stack up to 40 units, allowing for a total system capacity of 640 handsets. SpectraLink's greatest asset is the middleware it has developed to provide digital and analog interoperability with a large number of PBX products, including those from Avaya, Mitel Networks, NEC, Nortel Networks and others. We used an analog interface to connect to our lab's Centrex phone service for our testing.
The SVP server box is similar in shape and size to the telephony gateway and provides QoS enhancements, which are required for environments that have even moderate WLAN traffic. SpectraLink's proprietary SVP QoS mechanism has been integrated into many third-party access points, including those offered by Airespace, Avaya, Cisco, Proxim and Symbol. Packets entering or departing the wireless or wired LAN are routed through the SVP server to get encapsulated or tagged, so that they get priority access when the wireless phones want to communicate on the WLAN. SpectraLink is committed to supporting 802.11e once it's been ratified, but until then, the company is providing its SVP as a tactical solution.
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