Another example of why FMC acceptance so slow. Ten different ways to make it happen. One thing missing here a cellular gateway to reduce costs even further while reducung latency for the rank and file.
Fred Palacios
Director of Sales
ITS Telecom USA
questions about this FMC deployment
This story stops rather abruptly and is missing some key details. Why was a multi-vendor, hybrid FMC solution necessary? Isn’t there a single FMC solution that could have done the job? Also, it fails to explain how Meru fits in the picture ... Is Agito or T-Mobile (or both) integrated into/running over Meru’s WLAN? These additional details will help complete this picture for me.
FMC question
Hi, Ihansel - Thanks for your interest in this article. FYI, a 'part 2' of this story will run on Wednesday, 6/11. This is actually a fairly complex story and was hard to fit within the word-count limits of a single newsletter, I discovered. :-)
But in specific answer to your questions:
1) Anthony Marano really liked the T-Mobile UMA solution and was hoping to eventually move off a PBX-based system for voice altogether (using the carrier for more of a mobile Centrex type setup). However, with all calls routed back to the T-Mobile central office, the delays (20+ seconds) were too great for the just-in-time-nature of the company's busy sales staff, who operate in a similar dynamic fashion to brokers on trading floors. The Agito network, by contrast, interfaces directly to the PBX and delivers the accelerated call setup, transfer, and forward times AM needed (milliseconds). Still, AM retains the UMA service to allow Wi-Fi roaming to homes and Wi-Fi hotspots, something Agito is working at improving. Today, the Agito system is fairly black and white - Wi-Fi inside the company; cellular outside the company.
2) Meru won the WLAN bid over Extricom, though it was a close decision. Both these companies place APs on a single channel and a single MAC address to avoid client sessions being handed off from AP to AP as users roam, inducing latency, and degrading voice sessions. Anthony Marano liked both Meru and Extricom very much. It runs a 460,000-square foot warehouse, however, and the Meru choice was basically made because APs could be cabled to existing wiring closet switches and aggregated to a single WLAN controller in the company's data center. The Extricom architecture requires you to plug the APs directly into their controller. With Ethernet's 100-meter limit, Anthony Marano would have needed a large number of controllers simply because of the cabling-distance challenges.
3) Both the Agito and T-Mobile systems work with the Meru WLAN. The UMA service tunnels calls through the Meru Wi-Fi network out to its central office across its GSM network, then back to the company's PBX. (UMA is an FMC technology that combines GSM and Wi-Fi - using Wi-Fi as the access network and GSM as the WAN). For its part, the Agito router plugs into an Ethernet switch; APs forward traffic to it, and the router determines, based on location information, which network the call should run on. The Agito router interfaces directly with the Avaya SIP server and PBX, so the call setup, forward, and transfer information is local, and delay caused by physical distance isn't a problem.
4) Can't one solution do it? That's the $40m question. :-) There are likely many companies whose voice handover needs could be satisfied by one or the other of the solutions in use at AM. AM's need for both very fast call setups and the ability to use Wi-Fi away from the office meant that using both seemed to make sense. That being said, there are also vendors out there who believe that with multiple networks involved (private and public) in convergence, the whole ecosystem needs to work together before true convergence among networks can happen. Keep an eye, for example, on Tango Networks, which is doing its darndest to bring the carrier and enterprise wireless worlds together.
Hope this helps!
--Joanie
another FMC question
Does the following statement mean they use Agito for Wi-Fi inside the office and T-Mobile for Wi-Fi away from the office?
"AM's need for both very fast call setups and the ability to use Wi-Fi away from the office meant that using both seemed to make sense."
Thanks,
- Lane Hansel
Followup
Hi, Lane -
We might want to take this offline after this exchange. My email is .
But the answer to your question is "yes," with the caveat that when there's no Wi-Fi network around, the GSM portion of the dual-mode handset kicks in and cellular is used exclusively.
Remember there are two groups of users at Anthony Marano:
Group 1) Administrative personnel, with pre-existing dual-mode BlackBerries, who use UMA (Wi-Fi access to cellular). If these users are at work, at home, or in a T-Mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, they can talk via Wi-Fi to T-Mobile's GSM cellular network. If they're in a taxicab, their dual-mode phone works pretty much like a regular cell phone, using T-Mobile's cellular network exclusively (no Wi-Fi). In both cases, the call is associated with Anthony Marano's Avaya PBX for 4-digit dialing, landline dial plan, etc. Traversing both the public GSM network and private Wi-Fi network induce some latency.
Group 2) The fast-talking sales folks with new, unlocked dual-mode Nokia smartphones. They use Wi-Fi for faster connections inside the building (no call setup with T-Mobile's central office required). Then, when they roam outdoors and out of the range of their own Meru Wi-Fi network, they spill over to the traditional GSM cellular network. Again, calls remain associated with the company's Avaya PBX. Agito has some provisions for these users to program their phones to "discover" Wi-Fi hot spots that they regularly use, such as at home or a local coffee shop. But currently, since Agito Route Points (the handoff markers that tell a phone to transition the call) aren't installed everywhere in the world, cellular-to-Wi-Fi handoff can't be seamless in all public places (yet).
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