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May 17, 2006
VoWi-Fi Makes Enterprise Inroads
(Wireless Week Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)One phone and one phone number that can be used for business and pleasure, anywhere inside the enterprise through the company's PBX, outside on a road trip or at home. That's the vision behind the marriage of cellular telecommunications and voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) for business.
Some enterprises on the cutting technology edge are using VoWi-Fi, mostly in vertical industries such as health care, retail and warehousing. But those first Wi-Fi phones don't work when the employee leaves the WLAN network behind.
"Wi-Fi voice, to date, is in limited deployment," says Abner Germanow, director of enterprise networking at the analyst firm IDC. Companies find VoWi-Fi valuable in situations where cell coverage either is not present or the quality of service is poor, he says. It's most useful when the employee is not tied to a desk where there might be a desk phone available.
As cellular and Wi-Fi become wedded in dual-mode handsets, Germanow says, there will be an increase in utility and interest. The future of dual-mode handsets and services in the enterprises is a little hard to judge, he says, and may remain a niche application in the near future.
But, the analyst insists, once an enterprise unleashes the capability in even a limited way, it may create much wider demands. That's what happened with WLANs themselves. Once Wi-Fi was available in an enterprise, everyone wanted it.
Optimizing For Voice
That's the kind of appeal envisioned by WLAN giants such as Cisco Systems, which recently announced voice optimization capabilities for its WLAN equipment and deals with Nokia and Research In Motion (RIM) to make VoWi-Fi an easy process. The WLAN voice improvements work through the Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX) for its equipment.
Nokia has been working for nearly a year with Cisco and other companies, including OnRelay and IBM, on a complete system allowing cell phones to be used in an enterprise to access IP PBXs and legacy PBXs over a Wi-Fi network. The same phone could be used on the cellular network outside the enterprise.
Nokia will use its new line of Eseries phones for the enterprise. The dual-mode handsets the E60, E61 and E70 have started shipping to some European carriers and are expected to hit the United States later this year. Besides being dual mode, Nokia says they also will support multiple mobile e-mail solutions.
Tom Libretto, marketing director for Nokia Enterprise Systems, says the dual-mode strategy, where a phone number follows an employee anywhere he or she goes, can take costs out of an enterprise IT department budget. It may make employees more productive and responsive, he says, but there are real cost savings by eliminating desk phones and leased lines. Dual-mode phones also save on cellular costs when employees are inside the office.
Nokia also has a partnership with remote access provider iPass to build iPass' wireless connectivity software into not only the Eseries phones, but also the Nokia 9500 and 9300i. Loading the software on the handsets will allow the handsets to access iPass' Wi-Fi global network. The partnership announcement talked about data access, but voice could be on the horizon.
Nokia's Eseries phones using CCX will automatically associate with a WLAN using Cisco equipment, Libretto says. That means that any call placed on the phone inside the enterprise can be routed through the PBX. It also means that expensive calls, such as those made internationally, can be routed over the Internet.
"The converged solution also allows me as a mobile phone user to have one device that is both my work phone and my personal phone from Cingular," Libretto says. Business lines can be switched off when an employee goes home.
The Cisco voice extension software will be loaded into the Eseries handsets. The software takes care of one of the issues of using VoWi-Fi in the enterprise if you get too many voice users on an access point (AP), the call quality drops dramatically. The extensions also allow fast roaming between APs for voice calls, much like a cellular network, says Ben Gibson, Cisco's director of wireless and mobility marketing.
On The Rise
Cisco has seen a rapid increase in the past year in the quantity and diversity of Wi-Fi devices being used in the enterprise, Gibson says, including more use of voice.
One part of the voice CCX upgrades, called ignition control, allows IT departments to establish the maximum number of voice calls that an AP can accept. If a call comes in that exceeds the limit, it can be rerouted to an adjacent AP if one is available. If an alternative AP is unavailable, the caller will get a fast busy signal.
Cisco's studies of how WLANs are used show that people who make voice calls tend to cluster around a few APs. Gibson says IT departments need to find ways to load-balance the calling.
CCX has some proprietary elements, including the voice extensions, but the technology is based on standards, and Cisco is working with the IEEE and Wi-Fi Alliance on standards for VoWi-Fi use, including fast roaming and load balancing, Gibson says.
Executives at Kineto Wireless, one of the leaders in unlicensed mobile access (UMA) technology that ties Wi-Fi and GSM networks together, believe Cisco's interest in VoWi-Fi will help increase both awareness and adoption of the application, according to Steve Shaw, marketing director. UMA would work on top of any 802.11 network.
IDC's Germanow says the improvement in voice quality that CCX promises should be attractive to enterprises. And the involvement of Nokia and RIM in having dual-mode handsets using the voice extensions will give those handset manufacturers a leg up in these deployments.
(source: http://voipforsmb.tmcnet.com/news/2006/05/17/109757.htm)
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