Until standards for quality of service and roaming on Wi-Fi networks are finalized, enterprises looking to deploy voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) systems must deal with proprietary gear. Of course, it’s helpful if they know up front that that equipment will work with their existing WLAN infrastructure, so some companies are taking it upon themselves to perform interoperability testing.
Meru Networks, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup that touts its equipment’s capacity for voice traffic, this week announced that two leading VoWLAN vendors have certified its WLAN infrastructure as interoperable with their gear. Siemens and Vocera both tested Meru’s WLAN system and said that it worked seamlessly with their respective systems. Meru said it has also completed interoperability testing with SpectraLink equipment.
The certifications indicate that the company is “starting to cover the broad market,” says Kamal Anand, vice president of sales and marketing for Meru. He adds that the Meru system is compatible with Cisco handsets as well, even though they haven’t performed official testing. “We had a customer that had deployed Cisco phones on our infrastructure, so we are interoperable there.”
Meru had previously commissioned independent testing from The Tolly Group to verify its claims that, compared with first-generation access points, its system provides five times the user density, five times the number of wireless VoIP calls, and zero loss handoffs between access points. The tests indicated that Meru’s system could support 30 voice calls simultaneously, with access point handoff times averaging less than 3 milliseconds (50ms or less is considered acceptable for voice calls).