Big Boom Expected for Voice over Wireless LAN

Wireless LAN could reach one third of the voice communications market by 2007.

This is the prediction of a new study by international data networking and telecom market research and consulting firm Infonetics Research, which says that the number of organizations deploying voice over wireless LAN (WLAN) will triple over the next two years from 10% now to 31% in 2007. This increase is due to the growing availability of wireless voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) handsets and voice-enabling wireless infrastructure.

User Plans for Wireless LANs: North America 2005 is based on in-depth interviews with 240 small, medium and large organizations that will be using WLANs by 2006—including analysis of five vertical markets—along with surveys of 450 organizations for WLAN adoption rates.

Besides the tripled use projection, others findings included:

• 57% of small, 62% of medium and 72% of large organizations in North America will use WLANs by 2009

• Security and privacy were listed as the leading challenges of WLAN adoption

• 42% of respondents have a policy in place that defines how employees can use WLAN and other wireless technologies

• Intranet or VPN access and Internet access for guests were listed as the top two applications implemented over WLANs

• 44% of respondents deploy and manage access points separately, without using WLAN switches, although this practice is expected to decline by 2007 due to centralized control architectures gaining ground and the number of deployed WLAN switch ports growing significantly

Study excerpts are available at www.info.infonetics.com .

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