Back when Wi-Fi access wasn't as easy to find as a cup of coffee, the Wi-Fi Alliance seemed like a lone voice in the broadband wilderness. The group was championing interoperability and performance benchmarks, as well as a uniform way of marketing standards compliance to a retail audience at a time before Wi-Fi access was a public and household commonality.

Now, with the advent of mobile/Wi-Fi convergence upon us, the Wi-Fi Alliance is taking on a new challenge — interpreting a new batch of convergence standards and certifying and promoting the products that could help make mobile/Wi-Fi convergence — still an iffy commercial prospect — as broadly appealing as Wi-Fi itself has become.

“The convergence market is just getting started,” said Frank Hanzlik, managing director for the Wi-Fi Alliance. “We're just beginning to see the first wave of products for certification.”

The group already has received close to 20 mobile/Wi-Fi converged handsets for testing in its certification labs, Hanzlik said. In addition to meeting requirements of voice over wireless local area network (WLAN) specifications such as 802.11e, these products also will need to be tested for compliance with the unlicensed mobile access (UMA) specification, the 3GPP standard for fixed/mobile convergence.

802.11e is the standard on which the alliance's ongoing Wi-Fi multimedia (WMM) certification program is based. WMM borrowed specific elements of the larger 802.11e standard to produce an interoperability certification plan that would be more quickly commercially viable than the full 802.11e standard. (WMM certification began months ago, even though the 802.11e standard wasn't approved in full until just a few weeks ago.)

The Wi-Fi Alliance will launch its Wi-Fi Scheduled Access program in 2006 to certify compliance with elements of 802.11e that were not included in the early WMM program. Other Wi-Fi standards on the group's plate include 802.11r, which is in the works to support fast roaming between Wi-Fi access points — important to providing quality of service for voice in WLANs. Also, emerging standard 802.11u will focus on internetworking.

In regard to UMA, the technology may not be a core competency of the Wi-Fi Alliance, but the group is collaborating closely with the consortium that helped put UMA on the map — the U.K.-based Fixed-Mobile Convergence Alliance. “We've collaborated with them on requirements for UMA and SIP-based devices,” Hanzlik said.

Those requirements are largely based on Release 1 of the FMCA's Product Requirements Definitions document, announced by the FMCA about two and half months ago. These include the FMCA's Wi-Fi generic access to network interface — based on UMA — and Wi-Fi session initiation protocol (SIP) requirement sets.

UMA has been acknowledged by the FMCA, the Wi-Fi Alliance and broadly throughout the industry as the interim standard for convergent wireless communications. Eventually, Wi-Fi SIP will gain a foothold as SIP-enabled networks and devices become more common and the industry moves to adoption of convergent IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architectures. Certifying IMS-compliant products will present the Wi-Fi Alliance with another new challenge, and Hanzlik said the group is looking to partner with other mobile industry groups with WAN competencies in order to get the job done.

“It will be in our plans to support IMS products,” Hanzlik said. “Carriers are finally seeing that it is not Wi-Fi versus cellular, but that Wi-Fi and cellular can be a very powerful combination.”

The latest in 802.11

802.11e

Quality of service specification allowing, among other things, prioritized scheduling of multimedia applications.

802.11r

Standard nearing first vote. Supports seamless fast roaming of basic service sets between multiple access points and base stations within a single wireless LAN.

802.11u

Proposed standard allowing interworking between 802.11 access realms and other external network types, addressing issues such as seamless hand-off and repetitive authentication.