Forbes.com: Trio to combine cell and wireless LANs
Forbes.com: Trio to combine cell and wireless LANsTrio to combine cell and wireless LANs
Phil HochmuthNetwork World, 07/26/04, 07.26.04, 10:52 AM ET
Avaya, Motorola and Proxim this week are expected to announce a co-developed handset and enterprise network gear that let mobile phone users roam between cellular networks and wireless LANs.
The combination holds the promise of cutting phone costs for business customers and making mobile workers more productive. It is based on a new Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based Wi-Fi/cellular handset from Avaya and Motorola, IP-based or IP-enabled PBXs from Avaya, plus new WLAN switch and thin access points developed by Avaya and Proxim.
Users are both intrigued and skeptical.
"We have hundreds of house staff who need internal wireless communication at low cost," says John Halamka, CIO at CareGroup Systems, a Boston hospital network. With an Avaya PBX network, Halamka says he is looking into the vendor's Extension to Cellular technology, which lets any cell phone act as an extension of a PBX. But further integration of cellular and WLAN would be more valuable, he says, because staff could use their cell phones for five-digit dialing over CareGroup's WLAN. This also would reduce the electromagnetic interference that signals from cell phones cause.
Another user points to a potential drawback in the cellular/voice-over-WLAN (VoWLAN) technology.
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