30 Minute Interview

“If your network is not voice-ready then you are not ready.”

Matt Walmsley, Product Marketing Director, 3Com speaks to Dominic K on IP telephony, VoIP and the current status of wireless VoIP.

Matt Walmsley

Can you tell us about the status of 802.11n and its expected impact on the industry in general?

802.11n is still being worked on within the IEEE and as such the technical specifications and final ratification are some time away. 3Com is confident that the technical specifications will be agreed on sometime in 2007 with the final ratification of the standard in 2008.

WLAN is becoming a pervasive medium that complements wired access in business and organisations—ultimately people just want to connect to their information, collaborate and communicate. With the growth in real-time and convergent applications, wireless networks will need to deliver increasingly higher levels of throughput. This is what makes the prospect of 802.11n-based WLANs exciting as they will help deliver high-speed connectivity to secure converged networks.

3Com has a clear position regarding 802.11n, and it is that we’re waiting for the final ratified standard from the IEEE 802.11n working group before we release products. Enterprises and organizations should wait until the 802.11n standard is ratified and available in products as this will assure them of interoperability and backward compatibility with other 802.11 based devices and network infrastructures.

What’s required to transform an existing network to support IP telephony?

Survivability: The network should be resilient enough to support telephony. Network topology design, redundant links and resilient hardware designs all contribute to building high survivability for the network infrastructure

Predictability: IP telephony implementations require a streamlined, low latency network.

IP Telephony isn’t particularly bandwidth hungry but it does require predicable network response times and Quality of Service (QoS) techniques are used to deliver this.

Power delivery: The edge of the network should support the delivery of power to IP phones and other devices. This enables a clean single cable drop to each desktop which provides data access to PCs, voice and power connectivity to the IP phone.

Many companies have a growing population of travelling and remote workers. How can they support mobility to ensure that such workers always have access to the applications and data that they need?

Internet VPN access remains a compelling choice for remote data access while the continued proliferation of 802.11 based WLAN can provide pervasive mobile access in an enterprise’s offices and facilities. VoIP connectivity can be provided across both private WLAN and via the Internet. The devices the user may leverage are also becoming more diverse. Apart from the ubiquitous laptop PC, we’re seeing growths in WLAN enable PDAs and cell phones too.

Is multi-vendor integration in a VoIP system possible?

The standards are mature and there are many examples of integration of both hardware and software solutions into business class IP Telephony solutions. This is great news for customers as they can now choose best of breed components to build a truly bespoke solution that exactly meets their needs.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the key driver to achieve such integration. It is helping carriers, VoIP hardware vendors and application providers provide a standard way of interfacing their solutions together.

As organisations prepare themselves for convergence, how should they provision for and leverage an increasingly diverse set of IP devices?

Our voice ready networking solutions address exactly this problem. We provide an innovative and holistic approach to assessing, recommending and implementing a converged network, solving the most vexing challenges that confront IT managers as they deploy Internet Protocol (IP) telephony systems. With 3Com voice ready network, organisations can optimise network infrastructure for real-time voice and video traffic, ensure secure communications and protect business assets.

It also delivers the prioritisation and security parameters needed for high performance when voice and data are converged on a single infrastructure. Without them, businesses cannot be assured of the quality of their phone services. For effective communications in a converged environment, voice ready networks provide three essential elements: network assessment, business continuity, survivability and access control or threat management.

Finally, could you throw some light on the status of the wireless VoIP phone?

3Com released the 3108 Wireless Phone last year. The 3108 is a SIP compliant 802.11g based phone that supports WPA2 encryption, Wi-Fi Multi-Media and can even be used to read your email.