Wi-Fi voice gets a shot in the arm

Wi-Fi Alliance begins certifying voice products for single-AP use

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

It's still a long way to Tipperary, but the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun early certification testing for voice interoperability and - for the first time - performance.

The alliance last week said it has blessed its first batch of products for its Voice-Personal certification, which applies to voice-over-Wi-Fi (VoFi) in single access-point (AP) deployments in residences and small offices. In other words, it doesn’t account for the AP-to-AP roaming and handoff that will be de rigueur in enterprises. Voice-Enterprise certifications that will address such roaming are to follow in the middle of next year.

In addition to testing for multivendor interoperability, the Alliance is testing voice performance, which sort of goes with the territory (either a voice call works with a comprehensible level of quality or not). The requirements for passing Voice-Personal are less than 1% packet loss, 50ms jitter and 50ms delay.

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It's still a long way to Tipperary, but the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun early certification testing for voice interoperability and - for the first time - performance.

The alliance last week said it has blessed its first batch of products for its Voice-Personal certification, which applies to voice-over-Wi-Fi (VoFi) in single access-point (AP) deployments in residences and small offices. In other words, it doesn’t account for the AP-to-AP roaming and handoff that will be de rigueur in enterprises. Voice-Enterprise certifications that will address such roaming are to follow in the middle of next year.

In addition to testing for multivendor interoperability, the Alliance is testing voice performance, which sort of goes with the territory (either a voice call works with a comprehensible level of quality or not). The requirements for passing Voice-Personal are less than 1% packet loss, 50ms jitter and 50ms delay.

The initial list of voice-certified products is peculiar: No Voice-Personal handsets are on it (at least that have been made public), and the two APs that have been certified belong to enterprise-grade Wi-Fi vendors: Cisco and Meru.

So what’s the point of enterprise-grade APs being certified for use with Voice-Personal, when the two operate in different environments? Well, I can imagine cases in which an enterprise Wi-Fi network operator, such as a university or hotel, also wears a part-time service provider hat. In these environments, IT departments have little, if any, control over client devices brought in by students and guests. In such cases, having such APs already certified for Voice-Personal might be important for accommodating consumer-class handsets (when they become certified).

It seems like we’ve been talking about VoFi for ages and, indeed, we have. Ahead of IEEE 802.11e QoS and call admission control standards for Wi-Fi, SpectraLink (now Polycom) put proprietary mechanisms in place nearly a decade ago to ensure VoFi performance amid Wi-Fi data transmission. The SpectraLink Voice Protocol (SVP) for years served as the de facto QoS for wireless voice.

Cisco has had its own successful line of Wi-Fi handsets, and Ascom, LXE, and Motorola also offer some VoFi models. And Vocera, of course, is well known for its VoFi hands-free badges installed in many healthcare environments.

So what’s kicking the certification process off now? The various standards needed for quality VoFi amid data transmissions are finally falling into place. 802.11e components, for example, have been standardized, implemented and now Alliance tested. And ratification of a couple of long-in-coming key standards is expected this summer: 802.11r for roaming and 802.11k for load balancing among APs. These need to be in place before Voice-Enterprise certifications can take place, as they are required components for passing.

Read more about wireless & mobile in Network World's Wireless & Mobile section.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.