Offering VoIP Services in a Wireless Neutral Operator Environment

Wireless technology has enjoyed tremendous success in recent years. However, hotspots have largely failed as commercial endeavors. This is due to a mismatch in price (too high), coverage (too narrow) and services offered (to few). In this paper, we present a wireless city network testbed deployed in the new ICT district in Barcelona, based on 802.11 technology and the Neutral Operator model, that overcomes those shortcomings: It reduces cost and lowers barriers to entry, increases capillarity and provides city-wide implicit roaming capabilities. Most importantly, it offers a richer set of services, including location-based, elnclusion, Internet access and VoIP over wireless. This paper is centered on the VoIPoW service. We describe our VoIPoW implementation and its adaptation to the Neutral Operator environment. Our results show that even in absence of QoS mechanisms, WLAN technology is adequate in practical terms for VoIPoW deployment.