Wireless Broadband Vs. Wired Services: Let The Battle Begin: Page 2 of 6

All participants agree that Wi-Fi devices need to become commonplace (talking about Wi-Fi phones here) to really get the market started. But the business prospect of driving voice calls over IP is a huge attraction.

Question from Randall: Is Voice over IP the killer app for WLANs? Albert from iPass says 80 percent of its customers are enterprise users who roam. Said VoIP to softphones on laptops is a big draw for WLAN business, since most mobile knowledge workers are stationary (think travelers in a hotel or remote office location, or at customer site) and can take advantage of Wi-Fi access. Mobile worker (delivery workers) a smaller subset.

Simmons comment: It's going to take a lot of volume to drive this business, since collection and settlement technologies (for roaming between different Wi-Fi networks) need to have "significant volume to make economic sense."

Albert talks about a customer in England, retail operation with 1,000+ stores, where 80 percent of calls were store-to-store. They put Wi-Fi in every store, took cell phones away from execs. Such ploys offer huge cost savings, Mulica said. "There's a huge service provider agenda convergence coming," Mulica said. "And wireless is looking to take a significant part of existing voice and data business."

WiMAX Panel