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Los Angeles 2004: WiFi Telephony Summit

Day 3 — Wednesday, October 6

8:15 - 9:15 am
Introducing WiFi Telephony: An Overview

Aron Aicard, Product Manager, Inter-Tel
Mobility in the enterprise is quickly becoming a major consideration on a customer's wish list. As more companies investigate the costs and benefits of wireless communications, they face a number of questions specific to deploying 802.11. This session will discuss many of these issues, including network security, delivering enterprise-specific features throughout an 802.11 network, technical considerations when integrating 802.11 into an existing converged infrastructure, and vendor-neutral practical applications.

1:00 - 1:45 pm
WiFi Telephony Best Practices

Ben Guderian, VP of Marketing, Spectralink
Adding voice to wireless LANs makes a whole lot of business sense, offering companies across industries a speedy return on investment and a host of mobility features that were previously unavailable on traditional circuit-switched office systems. Ensuring the successful addition of voice to a network that has been carrying data carries a string of requirements. Accurate and effective telecom equipment integration with existing and new infrastructure can dramatically improve voice quality, network capacity, and roaming. Modifying a WLAN into a converged network is no easy feat and deployments unfamiliar with best practices risk weakening the full benefits of Wi-Fi telephony. This session will review best practices to ensure optimal Wi-Fi telephony deployment.

2:00 - 2:45 pm
WLAN Convergence for Business Success

Tony Rybczynski, Director - Strategic Enterprise Technologies
WLAN convergence adds a needed mobility dimension for IP telephony and multimedia communication systems. But wireless LANs are not wired LANs. This presentation will discuss the major challenges and recommend enterprise actions. As a result, enterprises will better understand the inherent characteristics of WLANs and will be better able to address the challenges they represent to deliver high-quality mobility for voice and data users in the enterprise.

3:00 - 3:45 pm
WiFi x5 — 802.11G Raises the Bar

William Beyda, Vice President of Product Development, Siemens
802.11g wireless routers are now widely available, and soon will be the only kind that consumers and enterprises buy. Offering five times the bandwidth, they cost little more than their 802.11b predecessors. What does it mean to mobility and collaboration when the WiFi network goes from a relatively anemic, shared 11Mbps to 54Mbps? Attendees will learn about the technologies leading up to 802.11g and their real-world limitations; how collaborative applications such as instant messaging, document sharing, VoIP, Web, and video streaming now work as well wirelessly as they do at our office desks; implications for the evolution of mobile endpoint devices; the proliferation of WiFi networks; and more.

4:00 - 4:45 pm
WiFi Case Study: S.A Community Hospital

Jan Synder, Manager Network Services, San Antonio Community Hospital
As healthcare organizations grapple with staff shortages and financial pressures, they're increasingly turning to technology to improve patient care in "the last ten feet." Systems that protect against drug interaction problems, match patients with treatments, and process patients' admissions and releases are proliferating. Increasingly, wireless technologies, and in particular 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs), are playing a critical role in delivering these services. One key driver for WLANs is the demand for voice over wireless IP (VoWIP), since it allows any caregiver to communicate with other nurses, physicians, and specialists to get critical information instantly.

San Antonio Community Hospital in Upland, California has undertaken the installation of the PACS radiology network and deployment of a second-generation wireless LAN, and is in process of bringing voice over wireless IP (VoWIP) phones to the physician and nursing staff. The hospital's senior telecom consultant will discuss the high points and challenges of implementing state-of-the-art wireless solutions.

Day 4 — Thursday, October 7

8:15 - 9:00 am
Eliminating Obstacles to Widespread Deployment

Merwyn Andrade, CTO, Aruba Wireless Networks
Scott Ruck, Business Development Manager, Proxim Corp.

The popularity of wireless networking and the innovation that has led to widespread deployment of WLANs and WiFi hot spots notwithstanding, major obstacles to mass-market acceptance of wireless networks remain. One of these is the ability to transport voice over WiFi with the quality that users will find acceptable. Today's wireless LAN solutions do not meet the stringent requirements of voice communications and do not allow for the future integration of voice, cellular, and data traffic. In this presentation the speaker will discuss the capabilities and functions required to truly support voice over WiFi and the remaining challenges that must be met for enterprises to move towards networks that can support integrated voice, cellular and data traffic.

12:30 - 1:15 pm
WiFi Mobility Distribution

Stephen P. Forte, President, Ascendent
Bob Mimeault, CEO Versatel Networks

What are the pressures on carriers to support WiFi communication? Are deployments of wireless solutions alternative access methods, or is this about supporting application-specific networking? What are the deployment plans and what are the devices that are going to take advantage of these networks? This session will take a look at impact of standing still; the pursuit of the holy grail of mobile communications; and the effect WiFi telephony has as the enabler of the consumer's choice for an alternative that is separate from the wireless service provider. Come discuss market data on WiFi mobile phones, broadband subscribers, and hotspots.

1:30 - 2:15 pm
Is Secure WiFi A Possibility?

David Duignan, Vice President of Worldwide Sales, VIACK Corporation
The growth of WiFi is astronomical, coming to every hotel, airport, and corner coffeehouse near you. But security remains a stumbling block for those concerned that their unencrypted data flowing through these wireless hotspots is easy prey for unsavory data snoops. There are some bright spots on the horizon, however. The industry is promising new standards such as 802.11i and the interim security protocol known as WiFi Protected Access (WPA). This session will highlight the security issues inherent in WiFi telephony and the types of applications that companies can use now to ensure their data remains private.

2:30 - 3:15 pm
Current Trends / A Look Ahead

Kamal Anand, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Meru Networks
Combining VoIP and mobility is today's hottest trend. VoIP has the potential to provide the same location-independent voice experience for the mobile worker as TCP/IP provided for e-mail, Web access, and other data applications. With the right mobile VoIP infrastructure, a user can seamlessly become part of the Enterprise voice infrastructure — regardless of location. Today, most technologies on the market are limiting in service quality, scalability, and usability. These limitations need to be understood before VoWLAN will see the predicted explosive growth. This session will take a look at the current trends and will explore what the future holds in store for WiFi Telephony.

3:30 - 4:15 pm
Metropolitan WiFi Access Architectures

Bob Ehlers, Director of Business Development, Performance Technologies
Wireless LANs use radio technologies to provide secure, reliable, wireless connectivity to Ethernet networks and the Internet. Today, the use of WLAN technology is exploding. As with any technology that is so hastily adopted, there are infrastructure challenges. Moving from an enterprise technology to a ubiquitous end user technology poses enormous issues for telecom carriers, such as radio spectrum management, security, authentication, billing, roaming and repair. This session will cover the architectures for wireless network deployment for public use, the issues with some of the current paradigms and some possible scenarios that may significantly reduce the overall cost of deployment and operation of these networks.

4:20 - 5:05 pm
The Site Survey Is Dead
Joe Bardwell, Chief Scientist / President, Connect802 Corporation
Assuring proper RF connectivity for reliable, high-quality wireless VoIP demands accurate design. In pioneering Wi-Fi networks this required a walk-around, on-site RF survey - a costly and time consuming project. In today's wireless network space the engineering technologies that have been applied to cellular telephony have made their way down to the Wi-Fi level, and the majority of Wi-Fi design can now be accomplished using RF computer modeling and simulation. This presentation
will use RF modeling and simulation to show how signal propagation, reflection, diffraction, and attenuation effect wireless VoIP performance and coverage. You'll be amazed to see what the signal propagation paths really look like, in real time, through the eyes of sophisticated computer modeling software.

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