* Infonetics Research releases survey on voice over WLANs
The number of organizations using voice over wireless LANs will triple over the next two years, according to a study released this week by Infonetics Research.
The study is based on “in-depth” interviews with 240 organizations of various sizes. The organizations are all based in North America, and they all are either using WLANs today or will be by next year.
Infonetics says 10% of the organizations surveyed use voice over their WLANs today, and 31% of the organizations expect to be running voice over wireless networks in 2007.
Fueling the growth will be the increasing availability of a range of wireless voice-over-IP handsets and of WLAN infrastructure that is capable of supporting voice. The primary reasons for deploying WLANs in general, according to the survey, are increasing employee mobility and increasing employee productivity. Voice is becoming an important reason for deploying WLANs as well.
Infonetics also surveyed 450 organizations about overall WLAN adoption. Seventy-two percent of large organizations expect to use WLANs by 2009, while 57% of small organizations and 62% of medium-sized organizations expect to use the technology within that time.
Not surprisingly, Infonetics found that the top barriers to adopting WLANs are security and privacy concerns.
Among those that use WLANs, 42% have a policy in place that spells out how the wireless LANs can be used by employees. Also, 44% say they deploy and manage their access points without wireless switches. However, Infonetics says it expects that number to change as centralized control architectures begin to take off.
