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Voice over Internet gets another vote: Agere goes for WiFi phones

Another blow for the mobile phone companies, who fought so successfully to prevent Bluetooth being used to place cheap Internet phone calls: Agere has followed Cisco and Mitsubishi into using WiFi, instead, bypassing cellphones altogether.

Agere has joined up with Japanese phone giant NTT-ME Corp to tackle the main problem facing WiFi phone builders: power consumption.

Normally WiFi would be thought of as much lower power than GSM. A normal phone can transmit a 100 milliWatt signal; a WiFi transmitter is restricted to 1% of that, at 1 milliWatt. So you would expect a WiFi phone to last 100 times as long as a mobile phone. In fact, the WiFi chips in most of the world's electronics gear won't last a tenth of the time on the same battery, as a GSM phone, because it wasn't designed to be miserly with electricity, the way GSM phones are.

The other problem facing WiFi phone designers is that the Internet really isn't good at transmitting continuous streams of audio, the way the GSM network is; and WiFi is not much better; the two combined have led some experts to proclaim that "WiFi will never be used for voice over Internet."

As can be seen, Mitsubishi and Cisco both think that the problems can be overcome; so does Agere now.

Agere has combined WiFi and "voice over IP" circuits into a new chip set, which will make the phone itself cheaper; and it has done a deal with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone subsidiary, NTT-ME, to include NTT's Universal Plug and Play software into the phone package.

At some stage in the future, when the chipset is ready, Agere plans to offer a development platform and reference design for handset manufacturers that will enable phones to be built that are work over Japanese broadband, automatically.

Agere's wireless VoIP solution consists of the following components:

- The T8307 system-on-a-chip, which provides VoIP call control and voice processing by integrating Agere's DSP (digital signal processing) 16000 capabilities with an ARM946E-S® microcontroller and advanced I/O capabilities.

- The WL60010 802.11b media access controller (MAC) chip, which provides programmable host interface support, one megabyte of on-chip memory and a glueless interface to Agere's 802.11b radio chipsets and modules. This chip, certified for Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), provides the highest level of security available for Wi-Fi.

- The WL1141 PHY module, which is the industry's first integrated 802.11b radio and baseband device.

- The CSP2200 chip, which integrates enhanced-quality audio codecs, power management tools, battery charger and ringer control drivers.

As part of its wireless IP phone chip set solution, Agere also will supply software drivers for the uClinux(tm) operating systems, the session initiation protocol (SIP) stack, voice compression codecs, and sample demonstration applications.

Sample quantities of Agere's wireless IP telephony chip set and development platform will be available in September, with volume production expected in the first quarter 2004. Unit pricing for complete chipsets will begin at $30 in sample quantities.

More information about Agere Systems is available from its web site at

Reader enquiries can be handled from Agere's web site or you can call Agere's Enquiry Line on +44 1344 296 400 -or e-mail the special contact point.