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Voice over Wireless LAN

As enterprise employees become increasingly untethered, with the ability to access their data wirelessly across campus and across the world, there is a desire to have mobile voice access too. In particular verticals this can lead to the deployment of dedicated voice over wireless LAN handsets for applications like voice messaging and voice picking, but in many environments this means that the mobile (cell) phone is used more than the office phone. With the majority of enterprises paying for the employees work-related mobile phone charges, the cost for this mobility is extremely high. Ironically, employees are most likely to be using their mobile phone to talk while simultaneously using the corporate wireless LAN network to access data. With the advent of dual mode WiFi and cellular mobile phones, there is a tremendous opportunity to reduce the mobile minutes being used by on-campus employees. In addition, international travelers can use the local office wireless LAN VoIP network for their calls rather than incurring international roaming charges. As a result, corporations are able to reduce their telecommunications costs significantly by leveraging their own network infrastructure.

While voice over wireless LAN (VoWLAN) can offer tremendous ongoing cost benefits, successfully deploying this application requires the underlying infrastructure to be highly available, low latency and have sophisticated QoS capabilities. It also requires whole enterprise coverage to ensure that there are not dead spots that would force calls to be dropped or to be switched to expensive carrier connections.

Aerohive Networks cooperative control architecture's unique stateful high availability, mesh redundancy, path resiliency and proactive session synchronization ensure that the network is always up. The architecture's best path forwarding ensures the data path is optimized to provide the lowest latency and the lack of a controller means there is no added latency or jitter due to backhauling the wireless traffic. Sophisticated QoS, with eight queues per client station in addition to the standards-based IEEE 802.11e/WMM (Wireless Multi-Media) extensions, is enabled at the network edge, in the HiveAP, where it is able to instantaneously respond to changes in the wireless signal. This is a far superior approach for supporting mission-critical applications, such as VoWLAN, than relying on a centrally located controller to do policy enforcement or queuing after the traffic has already traversed the network or too far from the AP radio to respond to RF throughput fluctuations.

Together with a robust set of voice classification, resiliency, quality and power saving features Aerohive's cost effective architecture and wireless mesh cababilities allows the enterprise to provide whole enterprise wireless LAN coverage, even in hard to wire and RF challenged locations. This combination of wireless LAN network availability, coverage and performance allows Aerohive Networks to deliver the underlying infrastructure able to support VoWLAN with the high levels of voice quality and availability expected by the enterprise.

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