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Is Your WLAN Ready for Voice?

Mobility brings organizations considerable improvements in employee productivity, customer satisfaction and cost savings. Wireless voice is emerging from a specialized, proprietary application used in vertical industries to become a productivity enabler in a wide variety of businesses and educational institutions. As voice becomes an application across your wireless LAN infrastructure, making the deployment successful means meeting the key challenges of wireless coverage, graceful scalability, quality of service, seamless roaming, and of course security.

Overview

Once IT unleashes wireless LANs to enable mobile employees to stay constantly connected through their laptops and PDAs, those same workers are quick to ask when they will be able to make and receive phone calls over the WLAN infrastructure. With wireless voice, employees can place and receive phone calls and hear pages no matter where they are—at their desks, in the hallways, in conference rooms or in the warehouse. Workers can use either a wireless IP phone or a soft phone on a PDA or laptop for these calls. In addition, push-to-talk applications and paging can be run over the WLAN.

This article highlights some of the best practices in designing an IP telephony solution for mobility as well as unique considerations of running voice over a wireless LAN.

Business Benefits

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