A Network World columnist thinks voice over WLAN isn’t going to get far: He really states the obvious here: "It's likely that wireless VoIP in the enterprise will follow a similar adoption pattern as that of WLANs: for enterprises where it makes sense, it will be deployed. And for enterprises where it doesn't make sense, it won't."
Gee, do ya think?
The way that vendors are squabbling these days, he may be right that voice over WLAN won't get far though. I've been told by some system integrators that once Cisco came out with its Wi-Fi phone, it stopped cooperating with the entrenched voice over WLAN guys, like Symbol and SpectraLink. That has resulted in some very unhappy customers who have Cisco radios and another vendor's phones and a system that doesn’t work well. Nobody is going to want voice over WLAN if they hear those kinds of stories.
I think that voice over WLAN will be used first by traveling business users. They'll use softphones that let them make calls from their laptops or PDAs while on the road. If that works out well and enough people do it, they may begin to pressure IT departments to deploy a more robust service on campus.
Microsoft has also incorporated VoIP into their new WinCE OS for any HW manufacturer who chooses to deploy it (no licensing fee associated). I believe that this ease of incorporation into any future WinCE device will provide the market penetration that VoIP over WLAN needs to climb out of the chasm that it is in.
I forsee business users and then the Y generation being the early adopters of this new "free" communication movement.
The person who wrote that voice over WLAN has a murky future has not used Skype (www.skype.com), the new P2P software for Internet telephony. No subscription needed, just the software. I've tried it and already had three "free" international calls. The sound quality is outstanding. And this is just the beginning. The software is in beta.
Interesting that you think adoption will be travellers first and then campus deployment... I think the opposite, that the simplified infrastructure necessary for voip (with or without wlan) will help drive voip in businesses everywhere, and the businessmen with voip-wlan phones will then be floored when they figure out their 'normal extension' works (albeit a bit differently) from the internet cafe down the street.
In some ways voice over wlan makes sense for the campus deployment, but for this to work (regardless of handover, QoS, etc, issues) you need to have already deployed an IP PBX.
At hotspots it really depends on your Internet QoS and whoever is going to complete the call, doesn't it?