Linksys IP phone system now generally available

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 07 June 2007 18:35

Business IT - Technology

Linksys has announced Release 2.0 of the software for its Linksys One small business telephony system and with it general availability of the technology, first unveiled in late 2005.

Linksys One is an unusual architecture: neither IP PBX nor IP centrex. All call processing is carried out by the individual SIP based IP phones. There is no switching functionality in either customer premises unit or hosted in the service provider's network on a softswitch. Secondly the system is designed to auto configure new devices as they are added, based the initial configuration set into the service router. A Linksys One installation comprises a Cisco service node - carrier grade Cisco equipment that sits in the service provider's network, the Linksys One 16-Port Services Router (SRV3000) on the customer's premises and individual end points, primarily IP phones.

Two key selling points are the ease and speed with which an installation can be configured - Linksys claims that a 20 handset installation can be set up in an hour - and the fact that the configuration is backed up remotely. So a customer installation an be recovered and rapidly reconfigured simply by replacing faulty hardware.

Although being promoted today primarily as a voice telephony system, Linksys One is intended as a complete communications architecture for a small business with functionality being added simply by connecting the appropriate devices, such as storage, video cameras, onto the network. New devices designed to be easily connected and configured to a Linksys One installation are being branded "Linksys One Ready.

With Linksys One, the company hosting the Linksys One service node 'owns' the system and generally goes to market through a number of resellers that install and manage, via access to the service node, their customers' installations. To date only a handful of services nodes are in commercial operation and two of these are in Australia, one operated by Soul and the other by IP Systems.

IP Systems is by far the most advanced: it has live commercial end users customers.  Soul is due to launch its service with a series o roadshows next month and is now signing up resellers.

Announcing Release 2.0 and general availability of Linksys One through hosted service providers, Linksys has played down the initial release as being almost a pilot.

At the Australian launch Graeme Reardon, general manger of Linksys Australia said, "Linksys One was launched from a vision perspective in November 2005. Now with release 2.0 we are offering a lot more functionality."

However that was not the impression Linksys gave at the time. Its November 205 press release said: "In the US, Linksys One solutions are scheduled to be available regionally in Q1 of 2006, with full national deployment next summer."

Andrew Cox, marketing director of IP Systems, said  his company had been "hanging out for release 2.0" and had been kept busy with teething troubles in release 1.0.