How will the market for 802.11 (WiFi) phones and dual mode
wifi/cellular VoIP phones in the Small, Medium and Large enterprise
markets develop over the next five years, and how will customers
primarily buy the phones, wireless gateways and other equipment, via
broadband providers, ISPs or via retail or catalogue sales?

---

Request for Question Clarification by easterangel-ga on 18 Oct 2005 16:47 PDT

Hi!

I was able to find general forecasts for converged wifi phones for
2004-2009 and 2006-2010. However, these are only concerned with market
figures. This does not go into the level of detail that will touch on
Small, Medium and Large enterprise markets, or the purchase behaviors
of customers.

Will this be ok as an answer?

Please advice on how to proceed.

Thanks!

I think that there is a strong drive for (IP-)PBX coming to Voice over
WLAN and on to GSM. In the enterprise market we now see softclients of
suppliers such as Nortel (in their mobile strategy), Avaya (with
Motorola) and others. PBX-Suppliers will probably only provide hybrid
WiFi/Cellular pure SW clients. Many will exist on Windows ME. The
physical phones can come from any supplier such as iPaq or Qtec. The
PBX and SW client will come from the IP-PBX supplier. An issue not yet
solved well is roaming/ handover etc between cellular and WiFi
networks. Such mechanism requires a mobile operator to have some kind
of connection to the WoWLAN PBX. Avaya has something of the kind with
Motorola (although I have doubts on how well it works), Nortel will
come soon up with a SW client where the user will have to choose the
network he is currently on.
A different issue is IP-Centrex, where we see stuff like GSM-Centrex
emerging (in which I don't really believe).
A very hot point in my opinion is the whole mobility (in private
environments tools like Skype or MSN Messenger; in enterprise
environments MCS5100 from Nortel or LCS from Microsoft). Such
applications will be a major driver for WiFi/GSM convergent
applications.