5/1/2006 -- Cisco Systems Inc. last week teamed up with Intel, Nokia and BlackBerry patriarch Research in Motion (RIM) to promote what the three partners termed "voice-ready" wireless networks.

The idea, Cisco officials say, is to give customers a one-stop shop (complete with a branding program) for deploying secure, interoperable voice-ready wireless clients. Cisco, for its part, pushes its Unified Wireless Network (UWN) vision as the interoperable foundation for voice-ready wireless. UWN has been designed to support the kinds of deployments that are typical of customers with mobile voice applications. In addition, it supports end-to-end quality of service and fast, secure roaming capabilities, officials say.

At the client end, UWN is enabled by the networking giant's Cisco Compatible Extensions, a set of hooks vendors can exploit to ensure that their client devices are interoperable with a Cisco-based WLAN infrastructure. Cisco last week announced new updates for the Cisco Compatible Extensions program designed to support voice applications and enhanced integration with client collaborators (hence the support of partners Intel, Nokia and RIM) to ensure improved voice-over-Wi-Fi security, roaming (especially across large campuses), and manageability features (such as capabilities to detect and mitigate radio frequency interference). The newest Cisco Compatible Extensions are also said to help extend client battery life, as well as provide call prioritization for improved voice quality-of-service. They also support analysis of key voice attributes (e.g., jitter, delay and signal loss) to help improve the user experience.

"Working with Intel, Nokia, RIM and others, we are...bringing together wired and wireless networks, voice and data offerings, and industry support for Cisco and partner offerings," said Brett Galloway, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Wireless Networking Business Unit, in a statement. Galloway claims that Cisco's UWN (and improved Cisco Compatible Extensions) help companies deliver the kind of "validated and optimized network infrastructure" that provides a secure foundation for enterprise-class voice-over-Wi-Fi.

Matt Godden, president and CEO of Xoasis Networks Inc., a provider of IP telephony solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses, likes what he's seen so far of Cisco's UWN initiative. "Voice-over-Wi-Fi is a very sensitive subject as it requires a great deal of preplanning and implementations never seem to produce voice quality acceptable to customer standards," he comments. "Cisco and UWN are on the right page with the initiatives to provide an end-to-end customer experience. This process will surely enable Cisco to provide a more reliable product as UWN's entire goal is to provide a one-stop shop [for Voice-over-Wi-Fi], mainly because the mixing and matching of vendor gear that customers often try and do to produce Wi-Fi-ready voice networks does not meet expectations."

That being said, Godden stresses, UWN does entail certain costs. "The one-stop shop comes with a very hefty price tag for the Cisco network experience and will still produce mediocre at best results for customers," he concludes. "VoIP itself provides no room for downtime, network latency or other unplanned events, and just now IP PBX and VoIP providers like Xoasis are mastering highly reliable and redundant VoIP applications. It's too soon yet for VoIP over Wi-Fi --- [because] customers' needs are not in line with what vendors can truly provide." -Stephen Swoyer