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Bringing WiFi Telephony Home Using a WiFi telephone at home seems to make sense. You can leverage a single WiFi access point for both your wireless data devices and your cordless phone. All you need is a way to get your telephone calls onto your WiFi network, and now with consumer VoIP services such as Vonage and ATT CallVantage, the pieces are falling into place for residential WiFi telephony. In fact, Net2Phone has already announced the availability of a WiFi telephone compatible with their VoIP service. Most people that are willing — and able — to make WiFi telephony work at home today can probably be categorized as early-adopters. Combining the two nascent technologies of VoIP and WiFi is still too complex today for widespread adoption, and WiFi handsets still cost several times the cost of a typical cordless phone. But it won’t be too long before integrated, plug-and-play residential WiFi telephony solutions hit home with enhanced features and capabilities to make them competitive with the common cordless phone. Before There Was WiFi Enterprise telephone systems providers have had limited success selling wireless telephony solutions to their mainstream customers due to the high cost of the available solutions. In North America, adoption of enterprise wireless telephony has been limited to markets with a strong need for mobile communication in the workplace, predominantly in healthcare, retail, and industrial applications. In contrast, the adoption rate of enterprise wireless telephony in Europe and some parts of Asia has been much higher thanks to having a standards-based wireless voice technology. The Digital Enhanced Cordless Telephone (DECT) standard is used for both business and residential applications, allowing broad industry support and lower equipment costs. About 2.5 million DECT handsets were sold into enterprise applications in 2003, with more than 25 million sold as residential cordless phones. But DECT has not been available in North America due to different radio spectrum allocations, although some DECT-based products have been modified to use the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band used by 802.11b/g devices. More DECT-based products are expected to hit the U.S. shores next year as additional unlicensed spectrum becomes available. The WiFi Versus DECT Debate Enterprises that deploy WiFi networks to support data applications can leverage that investment to support WiFi telephony as well with little or no additional infrastructure cost. It is clear that VoIP technology will replace traditional circuit-switched telephony in the enterprise. It is no longer a question of if, but when enterprises will migrate to IP-based telephony solutions. This is where WiFi holds a clear advantage over DECT, or any other proprietary TDM-based wireless solution. WiFi allows for end-to-end IP telephony making it the most elegant — and cost-effective — technology for enterprise wireless in the long run. We’ll probably see both traditional and WiFi-based wireless solutions deployed in the home and office for the next few years. Traditional wireless technologies like home cordless and DECT will continue to be attractive in markets where VoIP adoption will be slower, such as SOHO and smaller enterprises. WiFi telephony market growth will continue to build on the success in vertical markets, but will really start to take off along with general enterprise WiFi adoption. Ben Guderian is director of marketing at SpectraLink Corp. For more information, please visit the company online at www.spectralink.com. Today @ TMC
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