Sherman Scholten of Obihai Technology, Inc. made a guest appearance this afternoon on the VoIP Users Conference, and he may have let the cat out of the bag about a new product from Obihai that might be showing up sometime in the first quarter of 2012.
At about the 1 hour, 9 minute, 32 second mark in the program, Mr. Scholten said something pretty close to the following. This is not an exact quote, because when people speak live they include a lot of small interjections and sometimes backtrack a bit, and in print that’s hard to follow, so here I replaced such things with “…”, but the gist of what Mr. Scholten said was, “… and to your point about taking it on the road, we’ll have another Obi device coming out …, probably in about the next five or six months, it will have … two Ethernet ports and two FXS ports, … in which case if you do have an Ethernet port and you want to connect your computer or a network to the other it’ll have that, and then we’ll also have an option to connect that ATA via Wi-Fi. So you could actually use it from a hotel room connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi network. … again, you’d need … an analog phone to connect to it, but … this will help for people who want to play C.O.B.[???] … in an apartment complex or setup Wi-Fi, or … a building, or … somewhere in their house that … they don’t want to drag Ethernet cable to, they can just connect it via Wi-Fi with … this product.” When asked when this product would be available, he said “five, six months.”
The “C.O.B.” part was what I heard, but have no idea if that is really what he said – that’s the one part I couldn’t completely understand.
So to recap, this product will have:
- Two Ethernet ports
- Two FXS ports
- Wi-fi capability.
That’s all that was said about it, but it sounds interesting. I somehow doubt it will priced quite as inexpensively as the current Obihai models, but it will likely fill the needs or desires of many users. If I find out any more about this, I’ll let you know. You can listen to the entire program with Mr. Scholten by going to the VoIP Users Conference page and using the download link that you’ll find there.
EDIT (12/27/2011): The following image is showing up on the Obihai home page (click to display full size):
Charles Young said
Interesting news. My limited experience using hotel WiFi for an Android SIP client is that speed and latency or so variable that there is lots of delay and audio is broken to the point of not being able to understand everything that is said.
SIP over WiFi at home with DSL works very well, but with some added delay. I do not have an accurate way to measure delay except to count to an echo test.
I am curious about how Google Voice will change at the end of the year. I love free
guyinsb said
My OBi100 currently works fine while using an Ethernet bridge (Airport Express) for a wifi hop to my in-home router. I eagerly await an OBi box with wifi; I would buy 30 for my condo association, and get rid of the $25/mo landline bills.