A joint development project announced at the recent Fall Intel Developer Forum by Intel and Cisco could improve the performance and quality of corporate VoIP networks.
The companies want to ensure Wi-Fi wireless LANs deliver good VoIP quality and as much data capacity as possible, say high-level executives at Intel and Cisco. With their domination of the PC and network equipment industries, the partners are well positioned to make those capabilities widespread even if there isn’t a formal standards group, according to industry analysts.
The Business Class Wireless Suite, expected to be 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 homes and corporations. The companies were vague about that broader project but gave some details about the first two results of their cooperation, which is 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, says Dave Hofer, director of marketing for Intel’s wireless networking group. On a standard Wi-Fi network, a VoIP call has to contend with other data packets being exchanged by one or more users, and sound quality can suffer.
The aim is to let companies offer reliable, good voice quality over WLANs. Intel also might work with other vendors to help users get the most out of the new VoIP capabilities, Hofer says. 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 better call quality, Hofer says.
The other technology in the works could bring even bigger changes. It lets network managers use the 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, 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, Intel’s Hofer says. But the technology Intel and Cisco are developing puts more intelligence on the client and allows for real-time moves as conditions in a network change, he says.
Both new technologies are coming specifically to Intel’s Napa platform and new Cisco network gear, Hofer says. They could later find their way into the Cisco Compatible Extensions program, under which many vendors add capabilities to their Wi-Fi gear to work with Cisco networks, and into formal industry standards, he says.
The features eventually need to be standardized so they can become available to all users, analysts say. This is in the two companies’ interests, too, they say. Within six months to two years, Intel and Cisco will submit their technology to a standards body for ratification, predicts IDC analyst Abner Germanow. Intel wants to promote the use of notebooks for voice, and both companies want to drive the use of Wi-Fi as much as possible, he says.
“At some point it needs to be bigger than the two of them in order to really drive the goals of this endeavor,” Germanow says.
But with Intel dominating PCs and Cisco holding about 60% of the enterprise wireless-LAN market, according to Dell’Oro Group, a research company, the new technology will become widespread in any case, analysts say.
The companies are taking aim at the right problems, according to analysts.
Wireless LANs lag behind wired networks because they have been designed for range and signal strength rather than ample capacity, which is what users really need, says Craig Mathias, principal at advisory and systems integration company Farpoint Group. The 802.11 standards don’t give clients a way to tell which access points have available network capacity. For network administrators, this means a lot of uncertainty, Mathias says. Whereas on a wired network they can decide how many clients to plug into a switch, on a standard WLAN they can’t control how many clients try to use a given access point.
In addition, reliable voice quality on Wi-Fi PCs will become critical, Germanow says. Most business won’t buy specialized Wi-Fi phones but will put softphones on employees’ notebook PCs, he says. Most business calls in an office are not made while walking around, according to Germanow. And college students already use notebooks for voice calls on Skype’s VoIP service and on voice-capable instant messaging systems, he says.
