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January 26, 2004

Fast Roaming Standard

By Nancy Gohring

I wrote a short article for Infoworld about the proposal for a fast roaming task group: If the IEEE approves the request, which most involved think it will, a new standard will be hammered out to speed up hand-off. The current mechanism for hand-off in the 802.11 specification isn’t fast enough to support voice calls or other multimedia applications. Today vendors have their own proprietary ways to speed up roaming but they hope to come up with a standard way to do it.

Contrary to some earlier reports, Cisco told me that they are supportive of the effort. If the standard ends up being very different from the way Cisco currently handles roaming now, the company will support both the standard and its own technology.

Hopefully the standards process will create an efficient and fast way to do hand-off. While writing a different story for Infoworld about voice over WLANs, I found that most of the proprietary ways to support fast hand-off weren,t totally ideal. An improved hand-off mechanism may encourage more voice over WLAN implementations.

Posted by nancyg at January 26, 2004 10:38 AM

Categories: Standards

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