Ready for Wireless VoIP?

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Sandra Kay Miller

Just when IT departments begin to feel as if they have a handle on their wireless network traffic and security, business units have identified a new technological challenge — wireless Voice over IP (wVoIP). By leveraging existing network infrastructure, both wired and wireless, organizations are looking to reduce expenditures as they migrate from traditional telephone systems to VoIP's rich feature set that includes data and video.

The cost savings, especially for larger organizations, can be significant. For example, when Alabama-based SouthTrust rolled out Cisco's VoIP solution to 10,000 users across nine states, telephony costs were slashed by $5 million within the first year.

Furthermore, as the push for mobility grows, wVoIP can extend mainstream VoIP technologies to provide complete office capabilities and unified communications (voice, video, e-mail, IM) across multiple devices (laptops, handsets, PDAs) anywhere.

Connecticut-based research firm Gartner estimates that more than 80 percent of companies are either actively deploying or currently under way with IP telephony trials. It forecasts that within three years, VoIP deployments will be commonplace within the enterprise.

Juniper Research substantiates this trend with a prediction of wireless VoIP sales growing from $2 billion in 2007 to $15 billion by 2012, with half of the amount coming from the sale of switches and mobility controllers.

In a comprehensive wVoIP research project, Dean Bubley of London-based Disruptive Analysis expects mobile VoIP adoption to increase from virtually zero users in 2007 to more than 250 million by the end of 2012.

Bubley found that carriers will also benefit from the increased capacity of calls the wireless spectrum can support, which in turn, will decrease operating expenses through the amalgamation of both fixed and mobile core networks. Additionally, carriers will also be able to offer a variety of new services such as the integration of voice with Web-based data and video applications into their service packages.

So it's official — wireless VoIP is on the way. But how do you get ready?

Gartner analyst Nick Jones urges companies to prepare for wVoIP in ways such as selecting handsets with WiFi capabilities, even if it isn't currently needed.

However, there is much more to deploying wVoIP than buying new hardware.

“Voice puts additional constraints on the wireless LAN,” contends Bob Mayer, vice president of sales and marketing at Bandspeed, a Texas-based company specializing in next-generation WiFi solutions for voice, data and video.

One of the biggest challenges with wVoIP is network stability. If wireless traffic slows down during Web-browsing, file transfers or sending e-mail, it's a nuisance at best. But as more organizations heap voice and video applications onto their wireless IP networks, any congestion has the potential to degrade the quality of communication quickly or worse, to drop the call entirely.

Network congestion isn't the only problem wVoIP must contend with. RF (radio frequency) interference can be equally devastating. “People who are only using the network for data don't have a really good understanding or appreciation of how big an effect interference can have on certain applications,” warns Mayer. One of his favorite demonstrations is setting up a wVoIP telephone call with music streaming through the line until he switches on a cordless phone nearby. “Immediately, the VoIP call gets dropped. It's that simple,” Mayer says. In addition to cordless phones, RF interference can come from a variety of sources — microwave ovens, baby monitors and non-IP-based wireless video cameras.

Although Bandspeed and other wireless vendors have integrated sophisticated RF scanning tools and automated channel selection into their solutions, Mayer strongly suggests also using a spectrum analyzer. “As voice and video get put onto wireless networks, that's a tool that is going to be pretty important to detect the interference from other non-802.11 devices,” he says.

Maintaining clear, uninterrupted VoIP service — wireless and wired — is collectively referred to as Quality-of-Service (QoS).

“No matter what you do with the fanciest phone in the world, if an end-user hears jitter, gets latency or just has a bad overall VoIP experience, all the investment that you made and the utility you get from VoIP goes out the window because the user thinks it stinks. The end game is that you are able to deliver service the way people expect it to be,” explains Neil Darling of EtherSpeak, a Virginia-based company focusing on VoIP in vertical markets.

Another challenge organizations have discovered with early wVoIP deployments is the need for faster roaming and call hand-off capacity on the wireless access points. Users with mobile handsets move between access points more quickly, such as walking through a building, as opposed to the traditional wireless network installation in which users with laptops or PDAs access the network from various locations.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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