The quandary of managing the wired with the wireless network

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Faculty at the University of Moncton have a new way of keeping in touch with colleagues and students when they're roaming around campus: Wi-Fi phones that use the school's wireless network. The university, which is in Canada's New Brunswick province, had planned an IP telephony rollout after upgrading its wired network last summer. Adding a campuswide wireless LAN and using it to carry voice traffic was not part of the plan - it just seemed to fall in place, says Jocelyn Nadeau, IT director at the Edmundston campus.

"With the infrastructure we had, deploying wireless at the same time we deployed voice over IP just made sense," Nadeau says. For example, the upgrade included Power over Ethernet, so getting electricity to the wireless access points was simple. "We took a big project and made it bigger. But it all worked well."

Voice over Wi-Fi is among a handful of emerging applications that industry watchers say is helping to propel wireless from a conference-room convenience to a more pervasive, mission-critical technology for today's business environments (see "VoIP, the killer enterprise wireless app"). As that happens, enterprises are becoming more aware of the challenges of managing wireless components.

"Wireless still really has a long way to go in terms of manageability and predictable behavior," says Paul DeBeasi, a senior analyst at the Burton Group. "There are rules for how you design and deploy a regular wired network, and if you follow the cookie-cutter rules, you'll have a stable, reliable, high-performance network. It's not like that with wireless."