Is VOIP Over WLAN DOA?

prostoalex writes "Voice-over-IP in Wireless LAN environment - a futurist's dream of always-on always-connected service. Guy Kewney from eWeek tests the technologies that try to satisfy this market today and finds nothing but disappointment. " The best result we got was that just once, I heard his voice with a delay of about 15 seconds, saying "You just have to speak up!"--which was part of a 20-second burst of speech from him. The rest was lost.""

Comments

sataphone

[Cyberglich]

Well i have used stantaphone over my home wifi worked ok (1-1.5 sec delay) normal for anything of that nature.

The 802.11 basic standard does not support voice!

[Ho Kooshy Fly]

802.11 standard was modeled around having a CSMA/A algorithm that tried to be as much like Ethernet as possible. There is no provision in the BASIC standard to provide for clients to shut up for higher priority voice clients at all! This means that a data client can blow the voice guy to kingdom come.

There are extensions to the 802.11 standard like 802.11e and WME that will allow priority queuing and some minimalistic scheduling to take place. Other companies play tricks with the protocol to allow for voice clients to perform better under the BASIC standard but there are drawbacks.

In the end, it is too early to judge VOIP over WLAN because clients and access points have yet to adopt extensions to the basic standard.

-Ho

Test your connection out

[fiji]

You can simulate a VoIP call and get the MOS voice quality score. So if you want to see how your Wireless setup fares, visit testyourvoip.com.

Even if you don't care about VoIP, it is a useful test of the latency and bandwidth of your connection. VoIP is pretty sensitive to late packets so this tool highlights connectivity problems.

-ben