Voice Over WiFi Coming Soon

[Russ Smith]

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) has been around for some time now. In fact, VOIP has turned into such a business that California, always in the leading edge of regulation, has decided that VOIP telephony companies will need to have the same licences "land-line" companies do. Wisconsin and Minnesota have made similar decisions. (For more on that topic, see the article at ZDNet UK. With the success of VOIP, it should come as no surprise that people are moving to get Voice Over WiFi working as well.

Symbol Technologies is at work on VOWiFi software that will function a lot like a walkie-talkie (or the push-to-talk functionality of NexTel and Sprint cell phones). The software, called Voice Communicator, should be available in December. Symbol also plans to add voice support to several of its Pocket PC devices with support for VOWiFi coming soon after that.

NEC has plans to announce a voice-enabled PDA within a few weeks. The company also intends to integrate VOWiFi into thier IP PBXs using Airespace Inc.'s WLAN infrastructure equipment.

As with VOIP, to get things truly functioning, you'll need an accepted standard. The IEEE is already working on 802.11e, which will allow mixing and matching voice-enabled WLAN equipment among variousl manufacturers.