Businesses and ITSPs have long-needed an inexpensive way to connect legacy analog devices to a VoIP network, and Linksys announcement of the SPA8000 — an eight-port FXS Analog Terminal Adaptor device — early this year had many eagerly anticipating its release.

Finally, that time is here. The Linksys SPA8000 is now available in the United States.

We’ve been testing a unit Linksys made avaialble to us for several months. Read our First Look at the Linksys SPA8000-G1 or if you have already bought a unit, try the new Linksys SPA8000 Device Configuration Wizard.

Linksys officially retired the PAP2.

This shouldn’t be a big deal to most consumers as the PAP2 was more expensive than and not as functional as the PAP2T.

The retirement of the PAP2 may be an issue for service providers wanting uniform customer equipment.

Linksys announced the end of the SPA941/SPA942 four line upgrade license.

Starting with firmware version 5.1.10 for the SPA942 and firmware version 5.1.8 for the SPA941, the SPA94X series phones will automatically enable the ability to configure up to four unique extensions per phone.

Since last year’s VON, Linksys has graduated from a section of Cisco’s booth to its own booth. Several new devices made their debut this week.

First out of the box is the color screen, 6-line SPA962 phone.

Keeping with Linksys’ aim to build useful applications into the phone, the SPA962 comes with an RSS feed that offers several topical feeds for news as well as traffic and weather. It’s easy to see how WebEx could fit into this picture, for example, by integrating business applications like Salesforce.com right into the phone. The street price for the SPA962 is expected to be around $320.

The optional SPA932 sidecar delivers one-touch call transfer and line status for all other extensions.

To turn a single broadband line into a phone line, the new SPA8000 8-port ATA provides RJ-21 port to interface with a traditional PBX, as well as the eight RJ-11 ports for analog phones. The SPA8000 also delivers IP media loopback for automatic line testing, and SIP over TLS to offer the same level of security for phone calls as online banking transactions. The SPA8000 is expected to sell for around $300.

Designed to be provisioned and configured remotely by a service provider, the AG310 ADSL gateway with VoIP delivers VoIP and home networking in a single device. Calls can also be redirected to the PSTN via an FXO port. The AG310 will retail around $135. A wireless version is in the works.

The company is also releasing version 5.1 firmware for the SPA line, which includes configurable language selection as well as new security and reliability features.

The Linksys SPA962 Configuration Wizard is the latest addition to the Voxilla VoIP Device Configuraiton Wizard family.

This new configuration wizard has expanded service provider support and allows configuration of all six extensions.

Linksys SPA962