HOLTSVILLE, New York - January 19, 1998 -- Symbol Technologies, Inc. (NYSE - SBL) announced today that it is teaming with Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ - CSCO) to provide a complete wireless local area network telephone system based on Voice-Over-IP technology.
The system is comprised of the NetVision wireless telephone handsets and Spectrum24 wireless LAN infrastructure from Symbol and a gateway connection to a PBX, key system, T1 line or other Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) connection using the recently announced Cisco 3600 voice/ fax modules.
The system is being demonstrated this week at the National Retail Federation trade show, held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City from January 19 - 21.
With the new system, users can place or receive calls between wireless handsets or PC-based telephones at other sites over their company's internal TCP/IP network at no cost, worldwide. Due to sophisticated compression techniques, calls are carried over the company's data network with very little effect on normal data traffic. Using the Cisco gateway, outside or internal telephone calls can be placed or received in the normal manner. Normal telephone charges apply to these gateway calls.
The system conforms to H.323, the ITU standard for real-time multimedia teleconferencing over the Internet and corporate intranets. This standard is supported by the major hardware and software suppliers providing video and teleconferencing products.
"Installation of the phone system into the vertical markets, like retail, health care and package delivery, where a wireless LAN infrastructure already exists, is as easy as assigning an IP address to each wireless handset," said Dr. Fred Heiman, Executive Vice President of Symbol Technologies, Inc. "We believe that this innovation could be the spark that opens up the nascent horizontal wireless LAN market for office applications around the world," he said.
"By teaming with Symbol Technologies, we are demonstrating the versatility of Cisco's Voice over IP solution as it is integrated with Symbol's extensive wireless retail and commercial applications," said Mark Bakies, product manager at Cisco Systems. "Customers receive substantial cost savings through the consolidation of data and voice networks and at the same time are able to build true multiservice network infrastructures," he continued.
"The use of a wireless LAN connection for Voice over IP telephone conversations holds tremendous potential for opening new applications for this technology," said Jeff Pulver, noted industry guru on VoIP technology. "I believe that this is the first wireless local area network telephone based on this technology," he said.
The NetVision wireless handset, which looks like a standard cell phone, operates over Spectrum24, a high performance Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) operating in the worldwide 2.4 GHz band using frequency hopping spread spectrum modulation. The network is architected as a wireless extension to a standard Ethernet LAN and has been designed to support the IEEE 802.11 standard, which operates at a data rate of 1 and 2 Mbps. It provides fast, seamless roaming among cells using Symbol's unique, pre-emptive roaming algorithm with load balancing. Each cell can accommodate more than 25 simultaneous, full-duplex phone calls. Capacity is expandable through the use of multiple Spectrum24 cells, providing very high system throughput, excellent range and immunity to interference.
The Cisco 3600 voice module enables enterprises to integrate voice, fax and data across existing data infrastructures while significantly reducing recurring communications costs. Based on market-leading technology, each standards-based voice module supports two or four voice channels through a variety of voice interface cards. The voice modules support several toll-quality compression schemes including G.711 for high-bit rate applications and G.729 for WAN applications. The Cisco 3600 series router is ideally suited to retail, banking and corporate infrastructures because it fully supports all Cisco IOS software routing protocols.
About Symbol Technologies
Symbol Technologies is the world leader in bar code driven data transaction systems with more than 6 million scanners and hand-held computers installed. The company designs, manufactures and markets bar code scanning equipment, application-specific hand-held computers and radio frequency data communications products that are used as strategic building blocks for solutions for retail, warehousing and distribution logistics, transportation, package and parcel delivery, manufacturing and other industries. Customer information is available from the Symbol Technologies web site at http://www.symbol.com.
Cisco Systems
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