It’s been some time since no piece of WiFi hardware caught my attention (except for the Airport Express which also caught my $)… Today I found out about téliPhone while browsing through some stuff at one of the Camelot stores downtown. Tempting.

According to page 14 (or 26) of the manual, it’s SIP-based, although I didn’t find other providers referencing it. It seems this hardware is tied to their service and may be locked to use it.

Despite the “cool factor”, I still think it’s possible someone will be interested enough in sniffing your VOIP conversation, specially when it’s so easy.

Anyways, their site and litterature look so good & pro that I decided to take a shot and actually ask them about SIP interoperability of their service & hardware, as well as what (if anything) they do to make their service secure. To be continued…

Update: I knew I had seen this phone somewhere! So, yeah, it’s definitely SIP-based and if you want an unlocked version, well, get from the pioneers at FreeWordDialup.com 😀 . Oh, and still no answer to my email asking about security and service locking…

Update 2 (Jan. 12):
Got tired of waiting so I called their customer support and spoke to Maxime. He provided some answers and was very friendly. Here’s the roundup:

• Their phone is SIPbased and it’s locked to their service. They don’t provide access to its configuration or technical details (like login info) to configure other devices with their service, although someone’s supposed to call me back to verify that. This would be useful to configure things like Asterisk.
• They don’t do anything special or different from other SIP service providers to prevent network sniffing. Maxime even knew about Ethereal (brownie points for that!). When asked about sniffing the login information, he wasn’t sure so “someone will call [me] back”.