Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 13
Using Your Wireless Network
for Phone Calls
In This Chapter
� Understanding Voice over IP (VoIP)
� Using VoIP Wi-Fi phones
� DECTing your VoIP
� Using Skype without wires
� Understanding fixed mobile convergence
Phones have been around for over a hundred years. In developed countries
such as the U.S., the European Union, and many parts of Asia, there
are more phones (several times more in some cases) than people. In the
intervening century, the phone hasn’t stood still. Two big trends have
affected the phone business: the advent of digital technologies and the rise of
wireless technologies.
Digital technologies have been in use within phone networks for decades.
Phone companies use digital (and Internet protocol — IP) technologies
within their networks to carry and route calls from place to place. Even if
your home phone line is still an old-fashioned analog POTS (plain old telephone
service) line, chances are nearly 100 percent that some major part of
your phone call is carried over digital lines. And if you’re using a broadband
VoIP (Voice over IP) service (for example, Vonage or Skype) in your home,
your calls are 100 percent digital.
Similarly, wireless technologies have been around for decades as well. We
suspect that a lot of readers of Home Wireless Networking For Dummies have
never known a time without a cordless phone in the home. And cell phones
are beyond ubiquitous. There are over 3 billion (with a b) cell phone subscriptions
in the world (a bit less than that number of users, because many