QUESTION POSED ON: 26 April 2005
In your response to an inquiry about VoWLAN in a small office you said, "If you don't have VoIP plans for your business it would be difficult to justify using VoWLAN because you'd have to first invest in the IP telephony PBX and then deploy a wireless infrastructure just to do VoWLAN. If your business is small, that is hard to justify."
This is not so - there have been VoWLAN solutions around for years that do not require an IP PBX. Spectralink and others have Gateways to standard digital PBXs that are very cost effective and easy to install. The important points to focus on are voice packet prioritization, security controls, the ways that they are done today, and the forthcoming 802.11e QoS standard.
As much as I agree that it is appropriate and quite easy to add wireless infrastructure to VoIP, there are lots of "gotchas," including channel conflicts, subnet config. and AP hand-offs, coverage in stairwells and hallways, etc. that become important. Also, a number of my clients that don't have VoIP yet, want VoWLAN because they already have the wireless infrastructure in place. The tail wags the dog, even for those that don't want to go to wireline VoIP.
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