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VoWLAN: Do You Hear What I Hear?

As the Wi-Fi installed base looks to add voice to existing wireless networks and wireless IP handsets continue to sell, the Voice over 802.11x WLAN market will experience healthy growth in 2002 and beyond.

by ISP-Planet Staff [April 30, 2002]

According to In-Stat/MDR, additional demand from vertical markets such as education, healthcare, retail, and logistics will help the overall Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN) market to expand to over 80,000 handset shipments in 2002. This represents a significant jump from the 20,000 shipments in 2001. The high-tech research firm reports that annual shipments of voice over 802.11x handsets are expected to surpass half a million units by 2006, accounting for revenues of over a quarter of a million annually.

Brian Strachman, In-Stat/MDR analyst, said that even though the market is projected to grow significantly, there is currently not much demand for VoWLAN services outside of the education, health care, and retail markets.

"VoWLAN vendors are banking on the fact that if the solution is easy and cheap enough to implement, it will eventually find its way into areas outside of the traditional three," Strachman said.

This is reinforced by the fact that there are only two vendors in the voice over 802.11x handset market right now, Symbol Technologies and Spectralink. They have partnered with PBX, wireless LAN, and LAN Telephony vendors to sell their products, making almost all of their sales to these partnerships.

According to Gemma Paulo, also an In-Stat/MDR analyst, as the demand for voice over WLAN increases, more (and larger) vendors are expected to enter the market. Of course when this happens, VoWLAN hanset prices will drop and the voice portion of 802.11x technology will move into the mainstream business environment.

In-Stat/MDR has also found that Symbol and Spectralink both experienced tremendous growth over the course of 2000 and 2001, benefiting from the huge popularity of Wi-Fi (802.11b) technology, as well as the increasing demand for LAN telephony systems in the business.

Although Symbol claimed over 50 percent of the market in 2000, in 2001 the company slipped just under this mark as Spectralink experienced a tremendous uptake in the fourth quarter of 2001. According to In-Stat/MDR, Spectralink's success was due mainly to its partnership with Cisco to sell Spectralink's NetLink IP Wireless handsets.

Additionally, analysts contend that the ratification of 802.11e promises to provide some solidity to Quality of Service (QoS) measures to provide for increased voice quality over 802.11x networks. Although Spectralink has its proprietary QoS method, a standardized QoS would allow for more competitors to enter the market—once again driving prices down and accelerating VoWLAN uptake.

The report, Voice over Wireless LAN: 802.11x Hears the Call for Wireless VoIP examines the VoWLAN market, focusing specifically on wireless handsets that support IEEE 802.11x WLAN technology. Overviews of both the Wireless LAN and LAN Telephony markets are provided, as well as an explanation of VoWLAN architecture and equipment.

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