Still Not Sure About Voice Over WiFi

My biggest concern are the security issues which may be over hyped but do have merit remain the biggest obstacle's of true wide spread use and deployment of voice over wireless LAN solutions. Many of the respondents in the Kubernan/Webtorials 2007 Wireless LAN State-of-the-Market Study, sponsored by Nortel have basically said the same thing. The perceived “insecurity” about wireless security has been a consistent primary research finding each of the four years that the study has been conducted. Nearly 52% of 300 respondents, who are subscribers to the Webtorials networking education Web site and who play a role in their companies’ WLAN implementation, cited security as one of the two biggest challenges of building large-scale Wi-Fi deployments. From a data connectivity perspective you can live with eb and flow network connectivity, but with Voice you must have a consistent solid connection with no hick ups. QOS issues and hard to nail down across WiFi networks. RF is a crazy thing and does some weird things at times.

Another big challenge is the reliability and stability of Wi-Fi’s unlicensed spectrum which according to the respondent in the study garnered half as much attention @ (24%). The issue seems to remain primarily one of education and training: Most users believe the technology and capabilities exist to keep their networks secure, but implementing wireless security is so complex and multidimensional, they don’t feel confident that they won’t leave a protective stone or two unturned.

That being said, enterprises are doing some things right: Nearly 38% have deployed Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2), which embodies the most current and most robust IEEE standard for Wi-Fi security, 802.11i. Thirty-six percent continue to use VPN technology over their Wi-Fi connections for protection and the same percentage has also implemented wireless virtual LANs (VLAN) to segregate user groups and applications. About 13% have deployed wireless intrusion detection/prevention (WIDP) overlay systems from a third party, while another 20% have deployed the WIDP capabilities embedded directly in their Wi-Fi system by their primary vendor.

Other items and issues worth mentioning from the report:
* Enterprise plans for adopting VoIP over Wi-Fi are all over the map.* Enterprises are planning to wait for final standards ratification before deploying 802.11n networks.* The degree of enterprise Wi-Fi backbone coverage seems out of sync with the percentage of employees that seem to have access.

http://www.webtorials.com/