Despite having been around longer than internet based communications, cordless handsets feel like they belong with modern VOIP telephony. Part of the furniture in offices everywhere, the technology behind cordless phones has largely been left unchallenged for the best part of three decades, while all around change has happened at break neck speed.
That is until someone struck on the idea of running wireless telephones using WiFi. It is an ingenious idea - we already connect desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones to broadband remotely using WiFi, so why not telephones? Why have a separate protocol and network just to link phones to PBXs (phone systems) on the internet, when offices all now have WiFi hubs anyway?
With no specialist hardware needed, business telephone costs could be driven down even further than they have been already in the Cloud age. The cool thing about WiFi phones is that you could potentially roam anywhere in the world with the same handset, making all you internal office calls for free using the internet.
Reliable Standard
You might expect WiFi enabled telephones to have swept the market already, banishing the old technology to legacy status. But that hasn’t happened.
The reason Digitally Enhanced Cordless Telephone (DECT) technology has lasted so long is it is extremely good at what it does. DECT is a cellular system designed specifically to transmit voice, and nothing else. It connects your handset to the office network using a specific transmission frequency, avoiding risks of interference and giving extremely reliable connectivity within broadcasting range.
In effect, DECT can be likened to having your very own mobile network in your office.
Wrong Tool for the Job?
WiFi was not designed to transmit voice. Like DECT and mobile phones, WiFi uses radio waves to transmit signals from one place to another. The difference is in how WiFi standards interpret this data.
Voice needs to be processed in real time, and in the right order, for spoken conversations to remain intelligible. Designed with the transfer of computer data in mind, the way WiFi packages and unpackages the data it sends and receives makes no allowance for order and priority; computer systems are very good at unscrambling data, and slight delays in processing make little difference to how programmes work.
