Fixed Wireless Technology

Voice Over WLAN Patent Awarded

Symbol Technologies is one of the first to deploy commercially viable devices that handle voice telephony communications over 802.11 WLANs.

by ISP-Planet Staff [May 14, 2002]

Holtsville, New York-based Symbol Technologies, Inc., demonstrated wireless voice over IP (VoIP) gear at Networld+Interop in Las Vegas. Upon announcing that the intellectual rights had been awarded, Dr. Jerome Swartz, Symbol Technologies chairman and chief executive officer, said it's an exciting new patent that leverages the company's core technology strengths in 802.11-based WLAN communications.

"Enabling voice communications and enterprise telephony over wireless data networks maximizes customers' existing infrastructure investments and provides added functionality to already deployed wireless LANs and telephony systems," Swartz said.

The technology is part of Symbol's NetVision family of wireless voice and data appliances designed to manage voice messaging, caller ID, call forwarding, call transfer, call waiting, and other advanced IP telephony services. The technology allows services providers to expand their service offerings outside of traditional data markets into more corporate settings, like enterprise-class wireless office capabilities.

Dr. Swartz, Dr. Fred Heiman, a former executive vice president who founded Symbol's WLAN division, and Bob Beach, Symbol fellow, are named on the patent. Symbol, responsible for several major industry innovations over the past 20 years, has more than 750 issued U.S. patents. Dr. Swartz has more than 160 issued U.S. patents alone. The Symbol patent, filed on January 16, 1998, is the system that today adds telephonic capability to 802.11, 802.11b, and 802.11a wireless handsets and mobile computing devices. Such a capability allows these devices to access voice messaging features, which are available in wired telephone sets connected to PBX systems.

Prior to the technological breakthrough, Symbols says, telephonic capability and PBX functions like caller-ID, call forwarding, call transfer, and call waiting, would not function on WLAN client devices. With the Symbol patent for telephonic communication utilizing a wireless LAN, the company is in a good position to benefit from the burgeoning mobile marketplace.

According to In-Stat/MDR, additional demand from vertical markets such as education, healthcare, retail, and logistics will help the overall VoWLAN market to expand to over 80,000 handset shipments in 2002. This represents a significant jump from the 20,000 shipments in 2001. The high-tech research firm reports that annual shipments of voice over 802.11x handsets are expected to surpass half a million units by 2006, accounting for revenues of over a quarter of a million annually.

Brian Strachman, In-Stat/MDR analyst, said that even though the market is projected to grow significantly, there is currently not much demand for VoWLAN services outside of the education, health care, and retail markets.

"VoWLAN vendors are banking on the fact that if the solution is easy and cheap enough to implement, it will eventually find its way into areas outside of the traditional three," Strachman said.

The Symbol NetVision family of wireless VoIP appliances—NetVision Phone and NetVision Data Phone—offers a broad feature set and extensive PBX vendor option support. These products, which are being deployed across Symbol's vertical enterprise market segments, are IEEE 802.11b compliant and operate on International Telecommunications Union (ITU) H.323 standard-based telephony systems as well as other widely accepted industry call-control protocols.

The Symbol NetVision family of wireless IP appliances connect to select PBX gateway products like the Cisco Call Manager v3.x/AVVID, Ericsson WebSwitch 2000, Mitel 3800 Application Gateway, and the Nortel (ITG) Meridian1/BCM-Norstar to facilitate enterprise IP telephony features.

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