Voip over wi-fi will have to wait for QoS
21 February 2006
Following Monday's revelation that BT has its eye on global wi-fi coverage, one of the incumbent's partners, The Cloud, says it will be some time before VoIP over wi-fi providers are able to offer more than "best effort" service quality.
The admission has been bolstered by analysts who believe the technology remains at odds with the general perception of what is a quality service.
"The problem is there are a host of technical and commercial challenges to offering VoIP services at public wi-fi hotspots," says Mike Roberts, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.
"For example it's hard to provide the Quality of Service (QoS) necessary for VoIP calls at hotspots. BT may be able to provide the necessary QoS at its own sites but it only has around 1,500 hotspots in the UK, which is not a useful amount of coverage for a voice service. That level of coverage also means that BT will struggle to charge anything extra for offering Fusion at its Openzone hotspots," Roberts said.
A spokesman for The Cloud, which owns two thirds of the UK wi-fi hotspot infrastructure BT Openzone brands as it own, agrees.
"Wi-fi is a best effort experience, with VoIP over wi-fi there will be some QoS issues, which we plan to address as we see demand grow.
"At present it's best to look at VoIP over wi-fi in terms of 'quality of experience' rather than 'quality of service' - generally, the experience is still good," the spokesman said.
BT has roaming agreements with a number of major public wi-fi operators worldwide but making Fusion VoIP services work on the hotspots of its roaming partners is not straightforward. This is not only due to QoS, but also authentication and billing, said Roberts.
However, the Cloud's spokesman said that from its perspective, rolling out VoIP over wi-fi "is not a big commercial issue. We just transmit VoIP traffic like we do any other data."
"I'm sure BT is looking into it [quality of service]," Roberts added. "Because once Fusion works on hotspots worldwide it could be positioned as a service that lets enterprises and consumers cut their mobile roaming charges."
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