Why Voice Over Wi-Fi Has Telcos Dialing 911

When patients at Anne Arundel Medical Center need a dose of morphine or an extra helping of Jell-O, they don’t just buzz a nurse – they call one directly over the hospital’s Wi-Fi network. Old-style page buttons have been retooled to ring the wireless handsets of staff anywhere in the building. "You can do patient assessment on the run, right over the phone," says Amy Chi, a registered nurse at the Annapolis, Maryland, hospital. "You don’t have to waste time going to the room first." Hospital personnel are also better equipped to multitask, using their phones to dial conventional calls, whether they’re trying to reach an off-site doctor or the nanny at home.

By Peter Rojas Wired.com

The setup is powered by technology that could rattle the windows of the mobile phone business – voice over Wi-Fi. Think of it as the love child of the two hottest developments in telecom: voice over IP and wireless broadband. There are more than 3.5 million VoIP phones in the US – mostly at work – up from practically none five years ago. Meanwhile, the number of commercial Wi-Fi hot spots in the US exploded from 2,000 to 12,000 last year. Combine the two and any gadget – laptop, PDA, tablet PC, whatever – can become a voice communication device.

The first wave of voice over Wi-Fi is already hitting hospitals, schools, airports, and factories. And because many enterprises have already switched their phone systems to voice over IP, adding Wi-Fi should be swift and easy. SpectraLink and Symbol Technologies are among the companies offering 802.11b handsets that work with voice-over-IP systems. Twenty thousand such phones shipped in 2001, and 30,000 were sold last year.

Devices for the consumer market aren’t far behind. Motorola, Avaya, and Proxim have joined forces to produce Wi-Fi phones that will seamlessly switch to a cellular network once out of range of a hot spot. Hewlett-Packard and Transat Technologies recently announced plans for similar roaming technology. And in a sure sign of techno-arrival, the Internet Engineering Task Force created a mobile IP working group to establish roaming standards.

The promise of these devices quickly heads into Star Trek territory. All that bandwidth – a good 54 Mbps on the fastest systems – will allow voice over Wi-Fi to run full-fledged applications from a remote server, enabling speech recognition, say, or video downloads. Vocera, a leading VoIP company, sells the Communications Badge, which uses speech recognition to connect hospital workers. If, for example, a patient goes into cardiac arrest, a nurse can call out, "Nearest cardiologist!" and the server creates an instant voice connection. The communicators can also make regular phone calls and send and receive text messages.

For big providers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, voice over Wi-Fi isn’t pretty. Those companies blew billions on licenses for next-gen cellular networks. Now they may find themselves undercut by the same grassroots groups bringing free, unregulated Wi-Fi to the urban masses. With new technologies from Vivato and MeshNetworks dramatically extending the range of 802.11 signals, building a homemade voice-over-Wi-Fi network wouldn’t be too difficult. Short of that, existing Wi-Fi networks like Boingo and Wayport could someday offer inexpensive phone service to subscribers.

But if you can’t beat ’em, co-opt ’em.

Cellular carriers – already overextended – are planning to integrate Wi-Fi into existing services. US carriers haven’t begun trials yet, but Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, for one, is already letting users of Sharp’s Zaurus PDA make unlimited Wi-Fi calls for a flat fee. Will customers want it? Nurse Chi expects so: "It’s nice to be high tech."

Peter Rojas ([email protected]) is the editor of Gizmodo.com.

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