One for the design council?
Posted by CJD on May 22, 2012
VoIP telephone adapters used to be the way most of us used VoIP. They’re a bit of kit that you plugged your ordinary landline telephone into and, bingo, you’re using VoIP.
Then I moved onto using purpose built VoIP telephones and the adapter is in the man drawer, the garage or the attic with the mountains of cables, dead routers, old switches, mobile phones and dead set-top boxes that I can’t bear to throw away.
But it would be wrong to think that adapters are part of VoIP’s technological history; they are, after all, the core of Vonage’s offering to consumers in the shape of a locked down Linksys (now Cisco) PAP2T.
If fact they’re a powerful, versatile, reliable and, most importantly, cheap way of using VoIP and they have a really important trick – if you plug in a wireless (DECT) telephone, you now have a wireless VoIP service.
I’m reminded of all this because Cisco has just released an updated version of the PAP2, called the SPA 112 and it’s a little corker.
(For the VoIP nerds amongst us, you’ll remember that SPA was used originally by Linksys, so Cisco reverting to this nomenclature brings back a further wave of nostalgia.)
The VoIP adapter is definitely worthy of a technology design classic award.
