Is The Cisco IP310 Finally A Wifi Phone That Doesn’t Suck?

Not to belabor the point, but SIP Wifi handsets have been a pretty rotten product segment thus far along their evolution. While the concept is good the implementations have been lackluster. I suffered through 6 months with a Hitachi Cable WIP5000 some time ago before pursuing a SIP-DECT as a better solution.

The problems of prior offerings have been well enough described elsewhere. So when Cisco/Linksys issued a release about a new SIP Wifi offering, the iPhone Wireless-G IP310, it was easy enough to just ignore it as yet another bad idea. However, this product was announced many months back and only now finding its way into release. That’s certainly intriguing. And of course Cisco knows networks…wired or wireless.

Matt Brunk over at CMPs No Jitter blogged about this device today and reports that the device is capable of using 802.11 b/g/n wifi networks. Type B and G has been done before…type N is something new in a SIP handset. Type N wifi has provision for the wireless equivalent of QoS, which is known as WMM…for Wifi Multimedia. This is a key technology in providing workable high bandwidth streaming media over wifi networks.

Apparently Matt has a sample device to try in real-world testing. That will certainly be very interesting to follow.

Update: With little digging on the Linksys site I found this, which indicates 802.11b/g…but not n or WMM capability.