VoFi: Wi-Fi Finds Its Voice

Even if they never leave the corporate campus, many employees are business travelers of sorts. They spend much of their time away from their desks and desktop phones--serving customers on retail floors, sitting through marathon meetings in conference rooms, supervising operations at manufacturing plants and walking from one building wing to another.

Users often require constant access to their phones. That's where Voice over Wi-Fi (VoFi) technology comes into play. And by staying on top of the demand for VoFi phones, solution providers can gain the tech advantage.

As WLAN solutions become more reliable and secure, many enterprises are opening up to the idea of wireless IP telephony, using VoFi technology. But solution providers need to understand where the technology fits and which handsets best suit their customers.

"It's not always that they necessarily know that they want Wi-Fi for voice, it's that they want better in-building coverage and cheaper costs," says Phil Redman, research vice president at technology consultancy Gartner.

Generally, VoFi makes sense in environments where employees remain local to the corporate campus but spend a lot of time away from their desks--such as in hospitals or retail stores. The technology is also suitable in places where cellular coverage might be weak, such as in large buildings with thick walls or on campuses in remote locations.

"Primarily, health care is the largest sector for [VoFi] right now, and that has to do with a need to try to have a more efficient means of communication," says Phil Solis, principal analyst at Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based ABI Research, which recently issued a comprehensive report on the growing VoFi market. "It's more efficient than getting paged over a [public address] system. With the right VoFi handset, they can get a text message, and that improves efficiency and productivity."

"We've deployed a ton of Voice over Wi-Fi in health-care environments," notes Josh Zenner, wireless solutions specialist at Berbee Information Systems, a Madison, Wis.-based solution provider and subsidiary of CDW. "They can be reachable at any time from anywhere in the building. With doctors or nurses, it really is a life-or-death situation."

To that end, certain handsets are especially suited to certain vertical markets. Cisco Systems, SpectraLink and Vocera Communications make wireless phones with screens that support e-mail, text messaging and integration with paging or alarm systems. ( Click here to download a PDF chart that compares offerings, includes features and pricing.)

"What we're finding increasingly is that voice is one of several means of communications [for customers]," says Richard McLeod, director of unified communications at Cisco Systems. "They have a frequent need for IM, a need for voice, a need for status, and a need for access to the corporate directory and corporate e-mail. So the ways that they communicate increase, and having that available in one place with one interface becomes more important."

SpectraLink's NetLink h340 Wireless Telephone is designed especially for hospitals. It has a durable plastic casing, a backlit keypad and a warranty for liquid damage. Vocera's Communications Badge is a tiny clip-on phone that works via voice recognition, a feature suitable for nurses, cashiers and mobile workers.

The hospitality industry is a key area of focus for VoFi implementations, if only because hotels tend to have pervasive Wi-Fi networks.

"Hospitality is an up-and-coming area," Solis says. "Wi-Fi was put in hotels for guest access, but increasingly they're looking at it as a way for employees to use the network."

NEXT: A fresh way to start

In addition to suiting customers who already have WLANs in place, VoFi deployments also make sense for customers that are building networks from scratch--so-called "green field" deployments.

"As you look at green-field environments, people are much more savvy about putting in more wireless," says SpectraLink's Ben Guderian, vice president of marketing. "Often, wireless is something that deals with the mobility problem, but there's no other benefit related to the cost savings because there's Ethernet all over the place. But in new spaces, where you can eliminate the cost of wire drops, you can do it pretty cheaply, and if you can throw telephones on the same network, you can save money by not buying cables.

"You're dealing with two relatively new technologies--both WiFi and Voice over IP," Guderian adds. "VARs should be looking for opportunities around this, be leading-edge and thinking in terms of the wireless office."

One solution provider describes a VoFi deployment borne of a green-field network in which wires weren't an option. Digital Analog and Design (DAD), a Cincinnati-based solution provider, was tasked with networking the new showroom of a Toyota dealership that had no direct access to conventional cables.

"The challenge was that there was an access road that ran the perimeter between the new and existing Toyota dealerships," says Don Walter, vice president of DAD, which resells SpectraLink phones and Toshiba telephony equipment. "Our initial plan was to connect those facilities via an underground fiber. While that was our best-laid plan, the cable provider was unable to get permission from the township to bore that road."

DAD solved the problem by linking the buildings with a combination of lasers and wireless access points. A VoFi deployment was an obvious next step.

"There are 180 cars inside the showroom, so you can imagine how big it is," Walter says. "Having to get back to a [wired] phone was unproductive, but they also wanted to eliminate personal cellphones."

The company deployed SpectraLink e340 phones, which are designed for large enterprise campuses. The phones work with docking stations that act as dumb terminals until they are connected with a handset, allowing multiple handsets to work with the same docking station.

NEXT: System compatibility and pricing

VoFi phones work only in conjunction with a corporate PBX system or via a contract with a VoIP service provider. In most enterprise deployments, you'll be dealing with the former, which means ensuring that the phone will be compatible with the PBX system.

The majority of enterprise-level VoFi phone-makers also make gateways that are compatible with popular circuit-switched PBX systems. Enterprises that already have deployed IP-based telephony systems from the ground up simply need phones that will work with the right IP protocols, and some phones support more protocols than others.

In terms of compatibility, SpectraLink is a safe bet. In fact, the phone-maker has OEM agreements with several major telephony-equipment providers, including Avaya, Inter-Tel, NEC, Nortel and Siemens. However, the majority of WLAN deployments are with Cisco, which is proprietary with its equipment and software: Cisco's handsets work only with Cisco's Call Manager systems and are best-suited for Cisco-based environments.

One thing that may level the playing (and pricing) field a bit is the support for session initiation protocol (SIP), a popular call-control protocol for VoIP deployments that's gaining ground in VoFi.

"Everything will go the way of SIP eventually," ABI's Solis says.

To that end, "I get a lot of requests for [SIP functionality]," Berbee's Zenner adds. "They want to make sure things are as compatible as possible."

A SIP-compliant phone will work with a SIP-compliant PBX. SIP is helping to blur the lines between what comprises a business VoFi phone and a residential VoFi phone. For example, UTStarcom initially set out to make phones designed for residential customers for use with a VoIP service provider. But the Alameda, Calif.-based company's SIP-supporting phones garnered interest from business customers who liked the idea of deploying inexpensive phones in a corporate environment; UTStarcom's F1000 and F3000 phones cost $129 and $195, respectively. (SpectraLink's and Cisco's phones generally range from $300 to $600 and up.) UTStarcom has dealt with the demand by improving the phones' ability to hand over radio signals from one access point to another.

"Ours is a crossover-consumer and small-enterprise product," says Howie Frisch, a product manager for Wi-Fi handsets at UTStarcom.

While SIP compatibility ensures basic phone functions--a dial tone, for example--large enterprise customers are likely to pay a premium for the features found on higher-end handsets: instant messaging, presence awareness, e-mail and Web access, the ability for one phone to support multiple extensions and to be able to scroll through a corporate directory, and integration with CRM systems.

In general, VoFi handset prices are expected to decrease in the next few years.

"We'll see an average selling price of a little over $300 by the end of this year, and dropping down below $200 by 2010, based on the price of the components and increased volume," Solis says. "But they'll stay pretty expensive because they'll have good batteries, be more robust and have better displays."

Solution providers should be aware of the Quality of Service (QoS) protocols a phone supports to ensure good voice quality. Many VoFi phones support the IEEE's 802.11e standard, which focuses on QoS, or the Wi-Fi Alliance's Wi-Fi Multimedia specification, which is based on 802.11e. Both SpectraLink and Cisco support additional proprietary QoS protocols that provide comprehensive support.

Most of the VoFi phones on the market right now run on either the 802.11b or 802.11g modulation standard. Both standards operate in the 2.4-GHz range, which faces occasional interference problems because microwave ovens operate on similar frequencies. Solution providers should ask vendors whether they plan to support 802.11a, which operates in the 5-GHz range. (Some enterprises are deploying 802.11a networks to mitigate interference issues.) Cisco, for instance, plans to introduce a phone that supports 802.11a this year.