NEW YORK – Americans pay on average $50 per month for cell-phone service, yet there are free wireless hot spots in lots of places.
How about using them for your calling instead? I gave three approaches a try, and although none of them is going to make me ditch my cell phone in a hurry, they show that with a little development, Wi-Fi can definitely compete.
Wi-Fi calling isn’t exactly new: Wi-Fi telephones and walkie-talkie-like “communicators” have been available for offices and hospitals for years through companies such as Vocera Communications Inc. and SpectraLink Corp.
It works like standard Internet-based phone service, in which voice calls are broken into data packets just like e-mail, sent over the Internet and reassembled as sound at the recipient’s end. The difference is that calls go over wireless Wi-Fi connections.
But until recently, consumer options have been limited. A few months ago, Internet telephone company Vonage Holdings Corp. started selling a Wi-Fi handset, the UTStarcom F1000, for $80. Competitor BroadVoice sells the same phone for $100.
I tested the UTStarcom phone with Vonage service and compared it with two software programs for Wi-Fi calling on a handheld computer.
UTStarcom’s handset is not for the style-conscious: It looks like a cell phone from the mid- to late 1990s. With a monochrome LCD screen and a battery cover that barely closes, it sends a message of “cheap.”
The handset was the easiest voice-over-Wi-Fi option, but only barely. It’s difficult to control which hotspot it connects to, and it often fails to connect until it’s turned off and back on. If you’re using it with same hotspot all the time, more or less like a home cordless phone, it works fine, but that kind of misses the point.
The most serious shortcoming is the lack of a Web browser. That means most for-pay hotspots and even many free ones are unusable, because they require that users to log in or confirm agreement to usage terms. Completely open hotspots or encrypted ones for which you have the key are the only option.
Nonetheless, call quality is generally good, and the interface is reasonably familiar.
You may need to be more of a techie to turn your personal digital assistant into a Wi-Fi phone. I installed SJPhone, a free program from SJ Labs, on my Dell Axim X3, a PDA that runs Microsoft Pocket PC 2003. Dell sells an updated version of the Axim, also with built-in Wi-Fi, for $319.
SJPhone is designed to work with any Internet phone service, but getting there is another matter. To use it with Vonage, you need to add a “SoftPhone” option to your account, which costs $10 a month beyond the regular monthly cost of $15 and up. The SoftPhone account comes with a separate number.
You’ll also likely need help from Vonage technical support to configure the SJPhone software.
Once that’s done, though, this do-it-yourself cell phone works pretty well. The PDA’s built-in browser opens up hotspots inaccessible to the UTStarcom phone.
Incoming sound quality was good in my test, though the people I called complained of background noise, probably because I was using the PDA’s built-in microphone.
Also, sound quality declined when I used up the hotspot’s bandwidth with a file transfer to my laptop. Companies are working on implementing a system for giving voice calls priority over other Wi-Fi traffic.
As the third option, I set up my PDA with Skype, a free text and voice-messaging program. No adjustment to the settings was needed; I found Skype easier to use than SJPhone, though not as easy as the handset.
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