Another reason that site surveys are crucial is that planning for crowded areas can be particularly tricky, especially areas likely to have intermittent overcrowding such as a lobby that is suddenly full after a meeting but is otherwise empty.
Some vendors such as Meru Networks offer proprietary solutions to some of the problems inherent in VoIP. For instance, Joel Vincent of Meru Networks says their new product line helps to reduce the number of APs required in any particular location by managing them intelligently.
Meru's management console combines information from each AP. This changes the standard hub, or contention-based methodology to a switch type control that assures the full-time connectivity required for voice calls.
The added efficiency of a managed environment increases the number of concurrent sessions from the normally recommended maximum to as many as 30. Since access is controlled at the management console rather than simply by proximity to an AP, designs such as Meru's perform functions similar to cellular technology and can transfer calls between APs to perform load balancing and to better support roaming.
Another potential limitation is quality of service (QoS), which negligible for most forms of data but critically important for voice and other forms of multimedia such as video. Video feeds may be a bit more impacted than voice is also relatively more forgiving.
A boost to overall WLAN QoS should come along with IEEE's ratification of the 802.11e specification, which is expected sometime in 2004. The current draft supports interoperability for home and business environments. It also adds QoS for voice and multimedia applications. In the meantime, proprietary solutions such as Meru's are available.
