VoWLAN and Cellular’s Vows Imminent

11th June , 2004

US : With potential rewards of lower costs and higher customer satisfaction, the marriage of Voice over Wireless Area Network (VoWLAN) and cellular technology will be arriving sooner than most would think, according to research by In-Stat/MDR. The high-tech market research firm projects that VoWLAN/cellular combo handsets should start hitting the trial stage later this year, and that carriers, who see the advantages of offering this technology as too good to pass up, are trailing them. By 2006, VoWLAN/cellular handsets will be in many enterprise customer hands, and starting to enter the home market as well.

“The VoWLAN/cellular combo handset has all the abilities of a regular cellular handset, plus voice over IP over WLAN. Customers get excellent coverage in the areas where they talk most, such as their homes and at work, and carriers can offer VoIP service cheap, because a minute of VoWLAN airtime costs them only a fraction of what a cellular call costs,” says Allen Nogee, a Principal Analyst with In-Stat/MDR. “This lets carriers free up their cellular capacity so they can offer cheaper cellular data calls.” However, according to Nogee, with all the benefits of VoWLAN combining with cellular, there are some potential obstacles as well. First, carriers have to get the technology working, and the devices that support this need to be very inexpensive. Second, since cellular carriers aren’t experts in VoIP, they need to find quality companies to partner with to handle the VoIP technology. Third, carriers need to make sure that customers have all the capabilities with their new VoWLAN/cellular equipment that they have with their existing equipment, and carriers have to do this without the aggravation of getting into the customer premise equipment business.

In-Stat/MDR has also found that:
Initially, devices containing WLAN for data only will outsell devices with WLAN for voice, but by 2008, this will reverse, and the number of voice cellular devices containing WLAN that supports voice will exceed those that only support data. From that point on, the WLAN voice numbers only grow

By 2009, roughly 30% worldwide of all cellular voice devices will have some type of WLAN, and roughly 18% of cellular voice devices will incorporate WLAN designed to carry voice.

Home ProZone Subscribe To Newsletter 3G Forum