While I was away at TelcoTV in Dallas, Texas earlier this week, my colleague, Dan Rosenbaum over at FierceVoIP was chairing our second annual wVoIP summit in San Francisco (www.wvoip.com). I hear it went very well. Here's part of Dan's write-up:
The best lesson I got was over lunch the second day. We'd been just been hearing about the difficulties of providing high-quality wireless VoIP in an enterprise--how important (and hard) it is to train IT staff to deploy access points intelligently, how new WiFi technologies will allow easier handoffs, whether users will carry an extra handset and how high-quality its transmissions need to be, and so on.
So at lunch, I struck up a casual conversation with an attendee from Symbol Technologies, the folks best known for deploying bar code and other inventory solutions in industrial environments. It's a big company, in the process of being acquired by Motorola, that pays fierce attention to vertical markets. We've solved most of those problems, said the guy from Symbol. They all grow out of the wireless networking we do every day. Voice is just another data stream.
In a lot of ways, that's true. Voice is just another data stream, though one perhaps more sensitive than some. But maybe not; for Symbol, a scrambled or dropped packet can have a pretty profound impact in a scan result.
Wireless is young; wireless VoIP is younger still. There's still a residual feeling that a lot of people are forcing technologies--that are still very much evolving--to work together in unnatural ways. Carriers and service providers have one set of issues, and enterprise managers and vendors have another set--and they don't always meet very well. What was most exciting about the conference was the evident commitment to keep pollinating the ideas and solutions that everyone in the room had on their minds.
Check out the rest of Dan's coverage over at FierceVoIP. -Brian