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Office phones face new threats. Will enterprises hang up on desk phones?
<<<... Yet Dell'Oro Group estimates the market for IP desk phones will boom in the coming years. The market research company said 11.3 million were sold last year and the number will rise to 34 million in 2010. The growth will come even as PC softphone sales grow from 2.6 million to 8.6 million, said analyst Alan Weckel. While strictly Wi-Fi phones will settle into vertical markets such as hospitals, which restrict mobile phone use, dual-mode phones will also be popular, he said. Hanging on to the desk set is partly a matter of tradition.
"People still relate to their physical phone. It's like their office space. It's very near and dear to their hearts," said a network administrator for a large Canadian engineering company, who attended Interop and asked not to be named. The company recently bought about 2000 desk phones from Nortel as part of a migration to IP telephony. Because it was buying in volume, the company got each set for about $200. It was one easy choice for an IT department that has plenty of more complicated issues to figure out, he said.
Wired phones still tend to have better sound quality than wireless, vendors and analysts said. In some cases, they include more phone-system features than their wireless counterparts. And for softphones, the PC's reliability and startup time are issues, Weckel said. The right choice may depend on the user and the setting: dual-mode phones plus laptop softphones for employees who travel frequently, and dedicated phones for workplaces without PCs. For example, Zeus Nestora, a Subway sandwich-shop franchisee in Tucson, Arizona, uses Cisco IP phones in its stores for a variety of functions, including employees clocking in and out. more >>>