March 2003

BY RICH TEHRANI
Group Editor-in-Chief, TMC

Headsets stink. They really do. They get tangled in everything, your hands, your hair, and your clothes and if you aren't careful you can momentarily strangle yourself if you get up without disconnecting. Yet millions of us use headsets daily because they make us so much more productive by keeping our hands free to click the mouse, type, make paper airplanes or whatever else we do while talking on the phone. There are some good Bluetooth headsets out there but no really good wireless office headsets' I've tried a few but none worth the effort to even write about.

So when I heard GN Netcom was going to come out with something revolutionary in headsets, I pretty much thought it was PR-speak for "We want to come see you and show you our new headsets in all the colors of the rainbow" or something equally technically uninteresting. I guess I'm jaded. After all, there haven't been many really good office headset innovations in years.

A Great Surprise
I've been writing about products for enough years to know that you get blown away by new products when you least expect it and this was one of those situations: GN Netcom showed me beta units of their new GN 9120 wireless headsets (production units will be shipping by the time you read this). The headset runs on the same 2.4 GHz frequency shared by WiFi and Bluetooth networks but has advanced power management, which translates into about 8 hours of continuous talk time. The kicker is the 300 foot range and the fact that there is no battery pack to carry around. The headset converts from over-the-head to over-the-ear and is extremely comfortable.

Stumping The Headset
After years of WiFi use, I know all the WiFi dead-spots in our office and I assumed the headset would succumb in these same areas. I immediately took a tour of these zones with the 9120 and was blown away by the sound quality, regardless of where I went. I was told by the GN Netcom representative that a WiFi access point may interfere with the headset if the two units are in close proximity so I immediately made a beeline to an access point and tried to stress the headset to the point of sound quality degradation. No luck.

I then took out my Bluetooth phone and set it to search for other Bluetooth devices, thinking this would generate sufficient interference to trip up the GN Netcom unit. I even touched my phone, expecting the sound quality to diminish. Once again, no luck. The one ultimate test I didn't get to try was to bring the headset near an operating microwave oven. As you may know, microwave ovens are the bane of 80211.b users as they interfere terribly with this early version of WiFi.

Can You Keep A Secret?
What about privacy? I'm told the headset uses the Digital Spread Spectrum protocol with frequency hopping 90 times per second and 64-bit digital encryption. What this means is that the headset can avoid interference from other devices, while making eavesdropping difficult if not impossible.

Going The Extra Mile
If the designers of the 9120 stopped here, they would have done a great job and blown away every other wireless headset on the market. The great news is that they didn't stop; they decided to endow this headset with a feature I have never seen in any other design, conference calling. At the touch of a button, you can connect up to four headsets together so that they are effectively conferenced. The advantage is that there is no need for people to gather uncomfortably in the center of a conference room and shout at the conferencing device to be heard. Once conferenced, headset wearers can walk freely up to 300 feet from the base station initiating the call.

Need A Lift?
One drawback to wireless office headsets is that you aren't near your desk to lift the handset when the phone rings. The solution in the past has been to attach clunky devices to the phone that lift and replace the receiver. The answer to this dilemma is the GN 1000 Remote Handset Lifter, which will automatically lift the receiver once you go off hook on your 9120 - even if you are 300 feet away! It worked well in the brief demonstration I witnessed in our office.

Is This Headset For You?
The target audience of this headset is contact center supervisors as well as executives that are looking to be more productive. Small offices can use these headsets instead of central conferencing units, and of course members of the early-adopter crowd (you know who you are) are also likely purchasers.

What I saw in my brief demonstration blew me away and I am looking forward to doing a long term review with both the headset and the headset lifter, as my experience has been that headsets and lifters diminish in performance over time. I'll let you know if these GN Netcom products differ from my past experiences.

Other important points: you can have about 50 of these devices and they come with rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries that last about two years. Oh yeah, one other great feature is that calls aren't dropped when you move out of range' They wait for you to come back in range. The retail price for the 9120 is $349, which is a steal if you can use the conference calling features of the headset instead of a separate conference calling unit that could retail for about $1,000.