Wi-Fi infrastructure vendors are obliging, developing new standards for QoS and shipping new products that allow for faster roaming. But building a wireless voice network isn't just a matter of putting up a few new access points (APs). It involves a complete new architecture that more closely resembles a cell phone network than traditional enterprise Wi-Fi.
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Just as with voice over regular Ethernet, the most straightforward argument for Wi-Fi telephony is that it can provide two networks for the price of one. This makes VoIP ideal for greenfield sites--and when it comes to cordless telephony, nearly every site is green. Because Wi-Fi telephony appears to require little new infrastructure, enterprises previously unable to justify a cordless telephony network can now do so.
This is true up to a certain point. If you already have a Wi-Fi AP and a VoIP service or PBX, it's likely that your users have experimented with putting the two together. It's also likely that those trials suffered from poor performance, even if the network was well-engineered for Ethernet voice or wireless data. This isn't because of the laptop or PDA softphones that the users were probably running, but because voice imposes unique requirements on a wireless network.
Although implementing either VoIP or Wi-Fi alone can be a daunting task, getting them to work together is even worse. Security and QoS top the list of concerns in our reader poll (see Pros and Cons on page 28), and it's easy to see why: Both are absent in current 802.11 telephony.
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