The ShoreTel Dock:On The Desk But Off The MarkThe ShoreTel Dock:On The Desk But Off The Mark

The device relies exclusively on WiFi for connectivity, which could affect performance, depending on the enterprise.

With the ever-increasing importance of mobile and the ongoing debate as to the future of the desk phone, the always-creative ShoreTel has introduced the first dock that can turn your iPad or iPhone into a desk phone--of sorts. I've seen a number of mock-ups of tablet docking stations, but ShoreTel is the first to actually get a real product out the door.

Like Zeus, I got a chance to see and play with the ShoreTel dock at Interop last week, and there's good and bad with it--first the good. The device features an attractive design and a sturdy mount for the iPad that can pivot between portrait and landscape views. The arm is also removable, allowing an iPhone to be plugged in to the 30-pin charging connector.

Unfortunately for ShoreTel (and for anyone else who tries to ride the Apple wave), the new iPhones and iPads are going to the smaller Lightning connector, so if you have one of the newer models (e.g. iPhone 5 or the fourth generation iPad), you'll need one of those 30-pin-to-Lightning converter plugs. I'm not sure how that will impact the stability of an iPhone plugged into the dock, but ShoreTel has hinted at possibly bringing out a Lightning version.

The dock itself features a handset, keypad, speakerphone and six fixed function keys. To get the full functionality, you will need the ShoreTel Mobility Router and the ShoreTel Mobility client on the iPhone or iPad.

The big problem I have with the Dock is that the iPhone or tablet are still communicating over the Wi-Fi network even when it's docked. Cisco's abortive Cius tablet phone worked on the Wi-Fi network when it was out of the dock, but switched to the wired Ethernet connection as soon as it was docked; if you undocked it during a call it immediately switched to Wi-Fi.

The trouble is that many companies don't trust their Wi-Fi networks to support voice; a lot of those are concerned about their Wi-Fi networks' ability to support the growing volume of data traffic. In reality, any Wi-Fi network can support voice, but the question is, how many good quality simultaneous voice calls can it support?

The Wi-Fi standards have incorporated an elegant quality of service (QoS) mechanism called Wi-Fi Multi Media (WMM), which is described in IEEE 802.11e. All Wi-Fi devices wait for the network to be idle for a short period of time before they transmit; that interval is called a "DIFS" for DCF Inter-Frame Spacing. To give real-time users preferred access to the Wi-Fi channel, they set the waiting interval to be shorter than for a data device.

Of course the irony of QoS is that if you push someone (i.e., a voice user) to the front of the line, by definition you're pushing someone else to the back. Further, if you allow too many simultaneous calls to set up on a single access point, all of the available bandwidth can be consumed by the voice devices, effectively squeezing out all of the data users. So using Wi-Fi voice effectively means using WMM in conjunction with call admission control that will limit the number of simultaneous voice calls. Of course if the access point has reached that limit, the user's getting a busy signal.

Wi-Fi voice is a great trick when users are moving about, and it has been used extensively in certain verticals like health care and big-box retail. However, depending on it to support stationary users who are sitting next to an Ethernet jack does not seem to be an effective use. So if we can keep the iPad/iPhone voice population to a minimum, the ShoreTel dock will make it a lot easier and more comfortable to make calls from their desks, but until we get a version that switches to Ethernet when docked, this isn't going to scale beyond the "novelty" phase.

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