Enhanced radio telephone for use in internet telephony

Abstract

An enhanced radio telephone providing both wireless communication and Internet-protocol (IP) telephone communication. In addition to transmitting and receiving digitized and coded speech signals in a wireless fashion using a radio transceiver, the enhanced radio telephone can also exchange coded speech data with a computer which is coupled to a communication network. Thus, the enhanced radio telephone can selectively operate as either a conventional radio telephone or as an improved IP telephone. The enhanced radio telephone includes an internal speech coder which is implemented for low power consumption and which allows the enhanced radio telephone to be used with a relatively low-cost computer for effective and economic IP telephony. In exemplary embodiments, an enhanced radio handset is connected to an input/output port of a personal computer running a software telephony application. Coded and compressed digital speech signals are passed back and forth between the enhanced radio telephone and the computer, and the computer performs conversions between the coded speech signals and an appropriate network protocol. Because the computer does not perform speech coding and decoding internally, the computer functionality may be implemented, for example, using an inexpensive notebook or palm-top computer. Advantageously, a user may initiate telephone calls from either the enhanced radio telephone or the telephony application running on the computer.