Pulver introduced their first wi-fi SIP phone during the Fall 2003 VON conference. The handset works with his Free World Dial Up service.
The wi-fi SIP Phone is priced for the early-adapter consumer marketplace. The product is called the WiSIP Phone and will have a suggested retail price of US$ 249.95.
The WiSIP will be the second SIP cellular phone on the market. Earlier this year, Cisco Systems released its US$595 cellular SIP, though the phone, marketed primarily to corporate office users, requires a PBX environment to operate.
Pulver said his offering will work in an office or anywhere there is an "open hot-spot". Initially, the phone will not operate in a paid WiFi environment, such as those in Starbuck's coffee houses and other locales.
"We're working on authentication so that the WiSIP can be used at Starbuck's," said Pulver, noting that the WiSIP will be user upgradeable via TFTP. "That functionality will be released soon."
The WiSIP will be packaged with a recharging stand and battery that allows 4 hours of talk time and 3 days of standby time.
In just ten months, some 60,000 people have subscribed to Pulver's Free World Dialup service, that lets users make phone calls free over the Internet using SIP phones. You download the FWD software and get a five-digit FWD number. Then, you hook up a microphone and headphones to a PC -and you've turned your PC into a telephone. Your voice gets digitized and sent as packets over the Internet, using voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) technology.
SIP phone products for Pocket PC work with FWD service too.
