Review of Michael Robertson’s SIPphone

By Jim on October 20th, 2003

For most consumers, making Internet-based phone calls has meant either using free, but less than perfect services (like AOL’s voice chat), or paying a monthly fee to the cable company, Vonage, or the like. The former requires using a PC, which means leaving it on to get calls, and using a headset. The latter gives you a real phone number, but also saddles you with monthly fees that can really add up.

Now there’s a third way: Michael Robertson, of Lindows and MP3.com fame, has turned his attention to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones, starting a company called SIPphone. The first product – a VoIP broadband unit that uses SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), connects to your broadband and can dial up any other SIP device in the world.

SIP was designed for Internet data, fax, video, instant messaging, voice conversations, and even online gaming. It’s becoming a widely-utilized standard on the Internet. The competing Skype service – also reviewed in this package – uses its own protocol and thus cannot interoperate with SIP devices.

The phones aren’t cheap – $80 for one, $130 for two. The SIPphone units we tested include the following features:

* SIP 2.0
* SIP for IM and Presence
* Layer 2 and Layer 3 QoS
* Three-way conferencing
* Hands-free speakerphone
* Caller ID
* Call waiting
* Hold
* Forwarding
* Transfer

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