Netgear's Phone in the Rough

This Wi-Fi- and Skype-compatible device boasts excellent call quality, but setup and dialing calls to regular phones can be arduous

by Arik Hesseldahl

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Excellent call quality

The Bad: Tricky setup with lots of thumb-typing on a phone keypad

The Bottom Line: A great idea that needs some work in the next version

Reader Reviews

I've long been a skeptic of Internet calling services. What exactly, aside from cost, is so wrong with either conventional land-line phones or wireless phones that we really need a third option—especially one that typically has to go through a personal computer, I wondered.

Then again, I don't make all that many international calls, and so I never see a jaw-dropping bill from either my local phone company or wireless provider.

My skepticism toward Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, technology has been wearing off of late. That's happened as I've watched Internet-based calling services like Skype, a unit of eBay (EBAY), and The Gizmo Project gain popularity, partly because they're more easily used to call conventional phones.

Self-Contained Handset

Call me a VoIP dabbler, then. I have accounts on both Skype and Gizmo, and every now and then will make a sequence of personal long distance calls using one or the other, and generally find the results to my liking.

With this history of curious experimentation in mind, I was especially intrigued by the Skype Wi-Fi phone from networking equipment maker Netgear (NTGR). The device is a small, self-contained handset that runs its own embedded version of the Skype software.

This is a terrific idea, because—assuming you have a wireless-fidelity home network at your fingertips—there's no need for a computer to be involved in making a Skype call at all. It also could come in handy if you travel often and like using Wi-Fi hot spots in hotels and coffee shops, such as those offered by T-Mobile (DT) at Starbucks (SBUX).

Needlessly Complex Setup

The Netgear handset can be used to make inexpensive Skype calls to regular phones, or free calls to other Skype users as well, from wherever you are, without having to go to the trouble of booting up a laptop.

The theory is great. But the reality needs work. I used the phone primarily in two locations where I have my own wireless networks. In both cases, I used an Apple Computer (AAPL) Airport Extreme router. And when I used it, I have to say that almost the entire time call quality was excellent.

That is, calls were excellent once I got through a rather lengthy—and to my mind needlessly complex—setup. Since I want to secure my networks against would-be troublemakers, I try to lock out all devices but those I want accessing the network. That meant I had to add the phone to the list of approved devices. It also meant typing out the name of the network and the relevant passwords to get network access on the phone.

Password Bug

And, man, was that ever a pain in the thumb. Typing out passwords requires using the numerical keypad on the phone in the same way you type text messages on a wireless cell phone—hitting the five key twice for the letter K for example, or the number six three times for the letter O. You get my drift.

Once the phone was fully enabled for network access, I had to type even more—this time, my Skype account name and password. And I had to do this every time I turned on the phone. There's an option to "store" the user name and password so that it would automatically sign in to a Skype account upon powering up, but every time I tried to use it, it wouldn't work. It must have been a bug in the software. Let's hope it's fixed in a future revision.

Let's put those complaints aside and talk about the calls.

My first call was from my apartment in Manhattan, where my wireless network is connected to a Digital Subscriber Line. I called a friend with a Skype account in Washington, D.C. He took the call over his computer and we chatted for the better part of an hour, as though it were a regular phone call, and I gave little thought to the fact that I was using anything other than a plain old ordinary phone.