Already, Boingo and Vodaphone have announced a VoIP-over-WiFi service in which business travelers can make VoIP phone calls with Vonage softphoness from Boingo WiFi hot spots. The service will allow travelers to make and take phone calls at Boingo's network of 11,000 airports, cafes, and hotel WiFi hot spots around the world. The bundle includes Vonage's SoftPhone service and Boingo's WiFi service. Travelers can connect a softphone to their laptop, such as the XPRO SoftPhone, from XTEN, the preferred Vonage softphone client, and then make phone calls from any Boingo hot spot.
And Texas Instruments is tapping into OMAP processor architecture, which lies at the heart of many mobile phone designs, to craft a processing chip that will allow designers to support VoIP connections over wireless LAN links.
Meanwhile, for small and medium-sized businesses, WLAN equipment vendors Linksys and Netgear have announced wireless routers with built-in VoIP capabilities aimed at home uses and small offices.
That's not to say that everything is rosy as far as the technology is concerned. Security remains the biggest obstacle to WLAN adoption, although that barrier is being overcome as vendors improve security features and users become more experienced managing their networks. Additionally, adoption rates have been encouraged by vendors' delivery of enterprise-grade WLAN switches offering real-time access control and online policy management feature.
Today, use of the technology remains low. In a Networking Pipeline Voting Booth poll only 20% percent of respondents said they would deploy WiFi phones, 50% said they first needed to test them, and 30% said they have no plans to deploy them. Those numbers are not dramatically different from when we asked the question six months ago, when 21% said they would deploy them, 35% said they first needed to test them, and 44% said they had no plans to deploy them. The numbers are up, but not dramatically so.
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