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Communications Wireless Networking Hardware

ZyXel P-2000W VoIP WLAN Phone Reviewed 87

Posted by timothy from the what-will-finally-force-wifi-networks-to-tighten-up dept.
prostoalex writes "MSNBC reviews ZyXel's P-2000W, a VoIP-over-WLAN phone that supports 802.11b and 802.11g. Gary Krakow tests the $200 phone with a VoIP account from T-Glo (his phone came pre-programmed with that). Looks like a pretty decent solution for anyone who's on the go, but has consistent access to Wi-Fi networks: 'I took the phone with me to a number of friends' homes and tried it there. All I had to do is ask the phone to find nearby networks and join them. It was even able to find others' WiFi networks as I walked though Manhattan (no, I didn't try connecting).'"
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ZyXel P-2000W VoIP WLAN Phone Reviewed More

ZyXel P-2000W VoIP WLAN Phone Reviewed

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  • Two words... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:05PM (#13299130)
    War Talking!
  • Did anyone else misread that model number as a 2000 watt phone and think that would be a little excessive?
  • I know there are companies like Packet 8, that allow you to take your VOIP box with you, but you still need a regular phone and cables to go with it. This is most excellent.
    • I have a "first generation" WiFi VoIP hpone - the WiSIP that is great at home, but fairly useless anywhere else. Why? Most public access points want a userid/password to get on their network. There no way to enter that info from the phone itself.

      Maybe this next gen phone has a way. The article didn't mention.

      But for home wireless usage, absolutely. Quality is great.

      • Most public access points want a userid/password to get on their network. There no way to enter that info from the phone itself. Maybe this next gen phone has a way. The article didn't mention.

        Article: "I followed the instructions and asked the phone to find nearby 802.11b or 802.11g wireless networks. After a few tries it found my home access point. I typed in my network's security code - the phone re-booted and was ready to make clear sounding phone calls. "

  • Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)

    by spyder913 ( 448266 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:14PM (#13299203)
    Maybe someday we'll have small portable phones we can take anywhere without worrying about needing 802.11b access! I can't wait for that to happen!

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by yfmaster ( 686465 )
      sarcasm noted, but the plans for some cell phones are expensive, esp if you are roaming.

      • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by xtrvd ( 762313 )
        It's not expensive with the right mind-set.

        Observe:

        (I kind of hope this doesn't get moded up very much, or else a lot of people will start screwing the system like I do...)

        Here's my trick, get an unlimited incoming call plan from your mobile company, and an asterisk box with VOIP (From my employer in my case). To make outbound calls on the mobile, call the asterisk box from your phone and hang up. Have it generate a call to you after you hang up and present you with an IVR (Voice Menu) where you can dial ou
    • Then there's towns out in the deserts of eastern Oregon and Washington which do not have speck one of cellular coverage on any network, but *does* have high speed wifi internet access covering every last square inch of the town.

  • Try it with the power out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:17PM (#13299225)
    "So far everything works perfectly - fluctuating summertime electrical services haven't affected my phone service at all. "

    This guy is talking such shit. If he did have a proper power outage, I'm sure his VoIP is going to break.

    When we had our big power outage in the NE of N. America a couple of summers back, my land line carried on flawlessly. My internet went down and stayed down longer then the power was off. That would definitely break a VoIP phone, methinks.

    What ever you have to say about the baby Bells, they've had to maintain higher standards than other alternative providers of telephony. Or at least that how it seems here in Canada.
    • That's what you pay for on a land line.. Telco's generate their own power at each Central Office. Around here (Arizona) that is typically a huge rack of batteries (usually enough to run for 24 hours) plus a large CAT diesel generator with a huge gas tank.
    • In my area Verizon has been rolling out FIOS. What I am
      wondering is if this is a way for them to cut their power
      usage?  FIOS requires end user provided power w/ battery
      backup.  Any engineers know the details? Is the homeowner
      now proving power to ring the line?
      • Unlikely. Fibre transmitting equipment consumes much more power than an analog based system. The end-user power requirement is simply due to the technology... glass isn't conductive. Analog phones really don't draw that much power, and many don't draw anything until they're off-hook.
        • Interesting.. Thanks for the answer. I've also wondered about
          the survivability of the fiber lines/system.  Outside of the
          city its still strung up on poles like the old system, AFAIK. At least I didn't seem verizon digging up every street in the
          town!    In a hurricane or similar, will they have a lot more
          to replace compare to POTS?
          • Yes, fibre can be (and is) hung from poles (and towers.) I'll assume you've never seen the cabling up close, or watched the installation in any detail. So, I'll explain the technology a little better...

            The fibre used for telecom trunks is similar to the common stuff people are use to seeing in a data center for things like gigabit ethernet, oc-3's, and the like. However, it isn't one pair; it's several (dozen) pairs. The smallest I've ever seen was 3 pairs -- bellsouth's spar off a main trunk to an offi
    • I got my parents to switch to Vonage over their cable modem. Some high winds after the hurricanes came along this past summer knocked several trees down onto the phone lines, cutting out their POTS line that they keep because they want to keep the #.

      Well guess what, it took two days to fix the wires from all the felled trees while that buried cable and vonage service kept chugging away.

      If you were really worried about realiability like all the slashdot nuts seem to be (what did people do in 1920 when there
      • First off, this ain't the 20's...

        The resilience of various networks will vary wildly everywhere you go. Both phone and cable can each be on a pole or in the ground. Your parents have their cable in the ground and phone hanging on poles. It could just've easily been the other way around. And it would've been much more than 2 days to get it fixed; the PSTN is a regulated public utility with mandated availability requirements where as cable is not.

        In fact, I've seen the exact opposite... power restored in
  • Compare the price with a generic wireless home phone from Best Buy - except that they expect YOU to provide the base station ...

    I put up an asterisk exchange at home last month - I'd love to toss wifi phones thru the house ... but at $200/pop they still cost too much - maybe at ~$50 I think they get interesting

  • This isn't the first wifi VOIP phone and I know this company has another model or two but how do they perform in a WDS environment?

    I'm in a situation where we have a VOIP phone system in-house with between 3 and 7 APs across a 2 square mile radius. I'd be curious to know if it drops the call when it switches APs. I know most proxim cards don't if you're on a laptop but d-links do. I won't get into the quality of dlink wireless products. ugh

    Anywho, with a standby time of 24 hours and a 4 hour talk time it

  • Zyxel is good stuff (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I work for a large company...I think I just need to say our products are green and Yellow and you can figure out who we are...but never the less, a lot of our dealers are actually using these phones between their locations in order to cut down on their long distance costs. The range on these phones is pretty good and are a breeze to setup. Zyxel isn't very big in the US yet but they are huge in Taiwan. IF you want to find out what they are all about, check out their Zywall Firewalls. These things are ab
    • I'd be curious if you were talking about the consumer sonicwalls or the business class ones. Feature for feature the top 4 Sonicwalls outpace ZyXel's best. 100Ipsec connections? Not even gigabit access?

      Of course if you're comparing it to a consumer grade product they aren't so bad.

      • Last I checked, all Sonicwall's were business class. I think there's a big difference between "consumer" grade (D-Link, Linksys) and even SonicWall's low end.

        Having said that, it looks like the ZyWALL's stack up pretty good against Sonicwall's low/mid end.

        Per ZyXEL's home page [zyxel.com], their ZyWALL 70 won Network Computing's "Best Value Award" and SC Magazine's "Best of 2004" award. Not too shabby. Also did a quick google search and turned up this review from Network World, "the Zyxel ZyWall 70 comes in a close [networkworld.com]

    • I think I just need to say our products are green and Yellow
      you work for AIM [marveldirectory.com]?

  • They had this concept in the UK in the 80's (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:24PM (#13299269)

    and funnily enough it failed, why ? lack of connection points (it was relativly cheap too)

    BBC story about it [bbc.co.uk] , would be wise to read it before praising Wifi phones just yet

  • The loop hole in telecommunications regulation. A non-telephony mobile phone network. I'm sooo impressed, and worried that these things will have the FCC or whatever regulator applies to your country, making up new laws governing VoIP, simply because it is just so simple to use, vs computer and software. The key is the Wi-Fi.

  • How revolutionary!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:32PM (#13299318)
    Wow! How revolutionary! A phone that doesn't need wires, that you can use almost anywhere, that doesn't have long distance charges! Honestly, who cares if it's VOIP? People still complain about quality of regular cell service. I can't imagine VOIP over 802.11x. It brings new meaning to, "Can you hear me now?"

    That's kinda' like geeks who buy a powerful PC with a video card so that they can watch TV on their PC's.
    • Actually, it makes a lot of sense.

      I work remotely all the time, and often times from friends' homes in other cities. When working, I'm on conference calls for most of the day. And my cell phone may or may not work well at my friends' house, but their wifi always works well. And I don't want to have to haul all my VoIP phone boxes and crap with me to their house. So I've been looking forward to something like this for quite some time.

    • I can't imagine VOIP over 802.11x. It brings new meaning to, "Can you hear me now?"

      Actually, G.711u (or "a" for that matter) only use 64k, so, unless you're running torrents all the time, you shouldn't have a problem. It's the up speed that really counts, not so much the down speed.

      • On the topic, the ZyXel phone doesn't do too well with G.711. Documentation recommends g.729a, and for a good reason. I have been using one for the better part of a year now, and performance (over my symmetric 10mbps link to home) was abominable using the 64kbps codec - I think the phone just couldn't handle it. It is passable using g.729a, but it's still nothing special.
    • People still complain about quality of regular cell service.

      Complain? I'm afraid you haven't tried using a verizon phone around where I live. No matter where I am in the house, I can't go ten minutes without getting disconnected. I usually have to call my girlfriend back 5-10 times during a night's conversation. On top of that, my most frequent phrases are "What?" and "I can't hear you..." I don't want to complain, I want to cut verizon's balls off and smash them with a hammer. Maybe not in that order. Ar

  • A very superficial "review" (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:36PM (#13299346)
    I have one of these and while it is pretty neat, it still is pretty clearly a first generation product, despite being version 2 of the model.

    The largest problem is that you can't use these phones in places where you have to log onto a service provider in order to use the wifi connection - for example at a Starbucks. You can only use it on wifi access points that are wide open or for which you have the WEP key. Both 64 & 128 bit WEP are supported though.

    The firmware is still a little flaky. Once in a while, it randomly reboot itself. Also, it sometimes has trouble connecting with access points that use MAC address filtering, even if the phone's MAC address is correctly entered on the allowed list.

    The phone is easy enough to configure via its web interface. There appear to be a few features that are only configurable via web interface and a few that are only configurable via the phone's menus.

    The phone can hold only one set of SIP settings (i.e only one VOIP provider account) at a time.

    Battery life sucks. The manual suggests something like 20 hours standby and 3-4 hours talk. I'm guessing that the real numbers are around half of that.

    I bought mine at an Office Depot office supplies store (US$199), and it came with a sticker on the box promoting tglo and promising a $50 rebate if you signed up for tglo service. The phone is NOT locked to tglo and I have tried mine on Freeworld Dialup and SipPhone among others.

    The Zyxel website provides firmware downloads and a fairly comprehensive manual.

    Other than that, it pretty much works as advertised.
    • No kidding. The one SIP account limit is a real bummer for me, esp as another hard-wired ZyXel VoIP phone supports two. And its clock runs fast. And typing in WEP keys on the numeric keypad is no fun at all. If it weren't a free eval unit, I'd be pissed. (have been using it almost a year now)
  • What kind of ringtones does that bad boy got?!
  • Here we set ourselves up again [slashdot.org] to be arrested by buying another device that is set out of the box to be able to access networks without security.

  • Smart people don't like it... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe things have changed a lot with the new firmware version, but Nugget of distributed.net fame really doesn't like his:

    http://slacker.com/~nugget/asterisk3.php [slacker.com]

    Keep reading past that page, and he says he doesn't use it at all anymore due to it being so terrible.
  • I'd looked into these a month ago and this is the most positive review I've seen. Most reviews rate it as ok but flawed. I'm a geek and work for a VOIP provider. I'd like one just because it'd be fun to roam around work, home, and who knows where else without paying roaming or using cell time. I live in a rural area thought and wifi just doesn't reach far enough to get service in a whole lot of places either in the country or in town around a brick wall. I just don't see it as much more than a toy unle

  • What CRAP! (Score:2, Funny)

    by MistabewM ( 17044 )
    My ideal wifi handset would automatically find an open network and connect. And if it could not find an open network it would commence hacking into the least secured closed one. Not to mention logging anything financial that goes accross the line, and decrypting data in real time...

    Well, first voip handset provider to supply this has my business!

    ----

    sarcasm ( P ) Pronunciation Key (särkzm)
    n.
    A cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound.
    A form of wit that is marked by the use of sarcastic langua
  • Although neither of these are quite realeased yet,

    Truphone [scn.com] + a Nokia N91 [nokia.com]

    VoIP Over 802.11b when you can, and cellular when you can't.
    (sorry about the N91 link. It's as close as I could get on their stupid flash site)
  • Neither the article nor any comments I saw so far have mentioned any encryption. WPA-PSK? WEP? Cisco? Is VoIP by nature encrypted? Are there any privacy issues?
    • At this point, the majority of WiFi VoIP phones are supporting WEP and only WEP, which seriously limits their utility as more and more people (and corporations!) move to WPA. Heck, the bleeding edge have already moved from WPA to WPA2, leaving such phones even farther in the back of the dusty closet. Cisco apparently added WPA support to the 7920 firmware at some point, but even that phone was WEP-only for a good long while.

      Better yet, you don't have to look very hard to find stories about non-Cisco handset
  • Dings against this device:

    1. No WPA support!
    2. This device can't give user credentials for a T-Mobile hotspot account or other similar types of roaming Wi-Fi accounts

    So basically, I like the idea but its security needs massive improvement and it needs to be able to work on authenticated gateways that you find at most mobile wi-fi hotspots. Sure this device will work great on any insecure or unsecured WiFi network but I certain refuse to use any WiFi device that doesnt support at least WPA security these day
  • No where in the article does it mention security or encryption. Looking at ZyXEL's specs [zyxel.com]on this phone, it support the standard 64/128 bit WEP encryption standard which we all know is easily hackable. It would be very unwise for anyone to use a phone for use over 802.11 without strong point to point encryption. My theory is that the federal government has such strong control over telecommunications that they would never allow such a product to be released.

    Why is it that my cellphone can render 3D graphic

  • The P-2002W (the phone reviewed) looks way cooler than the 2002W I have, which has the feel of an early 90s cordless phone. The only other differences, besides looks seems to be the support for 802.11g and a portable charger to replace the bulky dock one has to carry around with the 2002W. I also noticed that the new model (like the 2002W) does not have support for WPA encryption, which is mandatory in some hotels and labs.

    One major complaint I have about the 2002W is that it heats up a lot, and one can o
  • It was a present from me but I use it sometimes. It's the v.1 less slick model.

    What it really needs is a tiny browser to accept the splash page on free AP's (e.g. Panera bread). Or just a function that retrieves a random webpage and "presses" any OK/I_Agree/Accept buttons.

    On a few occations I have brought a laptop, changed the MAC address to match the phone, started a browser, accepted the terms of use, turned the laptop off, and turned the phone on. Then it works.

    What it really needs is an open source firm
  • ... a mixed-mode phone - one that will work over WiFi AND also over one (or many) standard cellular technologies - for instance I would love a small WiFi + GSM phone !!!

  • Vonage Unhappy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IEEEmember ( 610961 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @08:52PM (#13299800) Journal

    According to a user on Vonage Forum, Vonage has requested that Zyxel not provide assistance to owners seeking to use this phone with Vonage's SoftPhone service.

    See Vonage restricting use of ZyXEL P2000 [vonage-forum.com]

    This is probably because of Vonage's investment in the competing product [vonage.com] from UTStarcom.

  • ZyXEL is currently in violation of the GPL. They sell consumer grade equipment that runs Linux, Busybox and the webs web server (all GPL). However, they never mention the GPL in any docs or on their web site, and they refuse to provide source code.

  • No worries about SIP cloning, international calls? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Not about this phone in particular, or even Wi-Fi SIP phones in general, but rather about SIP phones in general: I don't see a lot of discussion or concern about the possibility of someone cloning my SIP phone's identity, making lots of international calls, and running up my {Vonage, Packet8, whatever} bill. Given that I have seen no VoIP provider that will bill (like a landline provider) for service, but instead they all insist on tying the VoIP account to a credit card, this could turn into a nightmare.
  • I could not give higher praise to this manufacturer for the quality of build, updates and support of theri communications gear. My ZyXel modem is still going strong.

    -r
  • Zyxel stuff supports a lot of technology -- if you include the "future software upgrade" -- and lot less out of the box. Don't count too much on the "future software upgrade" though, or be prepared to wait a long time.
  • We're talking here same number that can go with me almost everywhere.

    holy crap, you mean i can have the same number "almost everywhere"! damn, i am so going to chuck my cell phone and its multiplicity of phone numbers! i am just so tired of having to use a different number at each cell tower i access...
  • Isn't this the same phone which was covered 1.5 years ago in Slashdot?

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/12/134623 0 [slashdot.org]

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