A joint development project announced this week at Fall Intel Developer Forum by Intel and Cisco could have significant effects on enterprise wireless LANs.

The companies want to ensure Wi-Fi wireless LANs deliver good VoIP quality and as much data capacity as possible, high-level executives of Intel and Cisco said Tuesday. With their domination of the PC and network equipment industries, the partners are well positioned to make those capabilities widespread, even if they aren't blessed by a formal standards group, according to industry analysts.

The Business Class Wireless Suite, planned to become available in the first half of next year, is the first part of a broad initiative by Intel and Cisco to improve the Wi-Fi experience in both homes and enterprises. The companies were vague about that broader project but gave some details about the first two results of their cooperation, both of which will be aimed at business users.

With the VoIP technology, Intel Centrino chipsets in notebook PCs using the upcoming Napa architecture will be able to reserve capacity on a Wi-Fi access point and communicate the need for packet prioritization to guarantee call quality, said Dave Hofer, director of marketing for Intel's wireless networking group. On a standard Wi-Fi network, a VoIP call has to contend with all the other data packets being exchanged by one or more users and sound quality can suffer.

The aim is to let enterprises offer reliably good voice quality over wireless LANs. Intel may also work with other vendors to help users get the most out of the new VoIP capabilities, Hofer said. In the first instance of this, Avaya announced at IDF that it will optimize its IP Telephony Softphone for Centrino laptops using the Napa architecture. With the Avaya softphone, the Business Class Wireless Suite will deliver even better call quality, he said.

The other technology in the works could bring even bigger changes. It lets network managers use the amount of available capacity on an access point, rather than just the strength of the radio signal, as a factor in assigning each user to an access point. That means that if the access point nearest a user is overloaded with other connected clients already, the user can be automatically hooked up with another nearby access point. This is already possible with many enterprise Wi-Fi systems, including new Cisco products acquired in its purchase of Airespace, Hofer said. But the technology Intel and Cisco are developing puts more intelligence on the client and allows for real-time moves as conditions in the network change, he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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