IT managers are not ready to trust voice traffic to their wireless LANs, despite vendors' best efforts to develop reliable equipment to integrate voice and data traffic over a single wireless infrastructure.
A number of manufacturers, including HP, see voice over WLAN technology as an ideal way for firms to test voice over IP (VoIP) before extending it to wired networks. In the meantime, vendors are developing suitable access points, wireless gate- ways and telephony applications based on existing 802.11 WLAN standards.
"Integrating voice over WLAN, security and convergence applications together might be the trigger for taking VoIP into the mainstream. This will provide corporates with the ability to untie the desktop phone from the desktop," said John McHugh, HP's UK vice president and general manager.
Ben Guderian, director or marketing for voice-over-WLAN specialist SpectraLink, agreed. "Lots of companies haven't yet taken the leap to VoIP yet, so voice over WLAN gives them a stepping stone that is a lot cheaper than rolling VoIP out across the whole network," he said.
SpectraLink's Link Wireless Telephone System is available now but HP said it would take between 18 months to three years to get suitable convergence solutions to market. Jason Chapman of analyst firm Gartner said it would probably take at least that long for most IT managers to accept the idea of putting voice traffic over wireless data networks. "The idea of voice over WLAN is available, but acceptance by a conservative enterprise market is not assured," said Chapman.
Most firms are sceptical that WLANs can ever provide the quality of service to ensure that voice traffic has priority over other types of IP packet on the network, in order to avoid pauses. Other fears concern signal congestion and data security in the radio wavebands used by 802.11 equipment.
The IEEE is currently working on new standards that will address all of these issues. HP and other WLAN vendors have said they will comply with such standards, but improving the wireless infrastructure still leaves other obstacles to acceptance.
Any system designed to replace the desktop telephone with an IP-based wireless handset must tackle problems of battery life, device size and price. "We are sceptical about [whether manufacturers can] put WLAN into a mobile handset form factor, and battery is a primary issue right now - although the manufacturers say that a lot of work is going on in that area," said Chapman.
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