Some employees might object to being contacted at home, and some enterprises might object to letting people run up the company's phone bill while out of the office. But these problems aren't unique to Wi-Fi telephony, as company-supplied cell phones suffer from the same issues.
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Improved productivity is nice, but it's not the biggest driver for Wi-Fi telephony. According to our reader survey, the main business case is simply the ability to save money on cell phone bills.
Wi-Fi telephony once seemed particularly attractive for internal calls, as these could avoid the public network entirely, but the cell phone industry is fighting back. Its main weapon is Push to Talk (PTT), a simulated walkie-talkie developed by Nextel, but now offered by Verizon and planned by others. PTT provides unlimited free and instant calling to groups of people within a local geographic area, such as employees in an office. This eliminates some of Wi-Fi's cost advantages, but not all of them.
A TCO analysis shows that, compared to PTT, VoIP over Wi-Fi can offer significant savings to some enterprises. The precise crossover point depends on the number and type of calls, but usually occurs when the number of users exceeds about 50. The main savings are in international calls and cellular subscriptions, as a large number of users can share several access lines.
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