I took a wi-fi handset with me to the Perihperal Visionaries summit I attended in Washington DC yesterday. It’s a good thing I did because my Nokia phone decided to go into its weird “see how fast I can drain the battery” mode and I didn’t have a charger. I needed to get on a conference call, and while I’m sure I could have borrowed somebody’s phone, it was nice to have the wi-fi handset and SoftGnome with me to place the call without a hitch. Nobody on the call knew I was 3000 miles away from home.

I spoke with Ted Stevenson about SoftGnome recently, and he wrote a very nice story in VoIP Planet:

PhoneGnome Shows Its Softer Side
In essence, it uses the SIP implementation in the PhoneGnome system to ring a SIP device�soft client on a PC, PDA, SIP phone, Wi-Fi phone, etc.�simultaneously with your home phone, wherever you are connected to the Internet. Similarly, it lets you place calls remotely, and they appear�to the call recipient�as coming from your home phone.

Ted also grasps the larger picture when it comes to PhoneGnome:

Unlike common analog telephone adapters (ATAs), which it superficially resembles, this heavily engineered system is like an object-oriented programming language, according to Beckemeyer. “Our system puts those building blocks together in different ways to get different results,” he said.

“When you’ve got SoftGnome and you’ve activated it,” Beckemeyer explains, “PhoneGnome takes the call on POTS, turns it into SIP, and says ‘Oh, this person has SoftGnome, so we’ll send signaling for this call at the same time we ring the local phone. We will also ring the SoftGnome that’s out there somewhere in the universe, over the Internet.’”

The larger point, according to Beckemeyer, is that the PhoneGnome architecture makes the system far more flexible and adaptable than conventional residential phone systems. “We make every call a VoIP call,” he told VoIPplanet. “We VoIP enable your old POTS line so advanced VoIP features actually apply to it.” Voicemail delivered via e-mailâ€â€?an integral feature of the original PhoneGnomeâ€â€?is one example. SoftGnome is another.

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