As with all wireless devices, VoWLAN has security considerations, with all vendors pledging support for future security standards. Meantime, you'll need to be satisfied with WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and MAC (Media Access Control) ACLs (access-control lists) or use a vendor-specific security architecture like Cisco's LEAP or Symbol's implementation of Kerberos. Although security concerns should not be ignored, risk can be somewhat mitigated by using wireless VLANs that are isolated from secure systems. Thus, you could implement a wireless VLAN called "phone" and restrict traffic only to handheld devices, the call manager and, if desired, a PSTN/PBX gateway.
Our Tests
For this review, we immersed ourselves in the world of VoWLAN for a two-month period. We talked to vendors, analysts and IT professionals, and we invited a long list of vendors to submit products for testing. In light of the market's immaturity, we were flexible in our product solicitation criteria. In the end, we received a variety of products from large and small vendors alike, including all the major VoWLAN system vendors--Cisco, SpectraLink, Symbol Technologies, TeleSym and Vocera Communications. We also took a look at some smaller soft-phone vendors--SoftJoy Labs, VLI and Xten--whose products are advertised as operating over WLANs. Because the various VoWLAN systems are so different, we didn't develop our usual report card, but we do provide a critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each product offering alongside our analysis.
Standards are also a major factor, with all the vendors using a mixture of open and proprietary protocols. Although all products run over 802.11b, none of the products we looked at included support for 802.11a or 802.11g. Many promise they will support strategic VoIP standards like SIP, but today, there's very limited interoperability between products from different vendors. Your choice of a product will depend in large part on your specific requirements and your existing infrastructure. For example, if you have already implemented a Cisco VoIP infrastructure, you'll choose between the new Cisco 7920 phone or phones from SpectraLink that support Cisco's call manager protocol (SCCP). All of the vendors provide connection to outside voice systems, even if it is only the lowest-common-denominator analog voice connection.
When Cisco entered the WLAN market a few years ago after acquiring Aironet, demand for those products tripled in the first month. It's a safer enterprise buy when the box says Cisco, and we think that's also the case in the VoWLAN market. Unlike the other vendors, Cisco's offering is best seen as a complement to its enterprise VoIP architecture rather than a standalone offering.
Cisco shipped us a preinstalled Cisco Call Manager (CCM) server, two 350 APs (access points), a desktop 7960 VoIP phone, and several of the handsome new 7920 phones. CCM provides full IP/PBX capabilities, including a range of advanced features.
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