After Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) the natural next step is Video over Internet Protocol. Video over Internet Protocol is not that big of a problem; unless you want to light up 20 thousand houses in a community then you need a huge internet pipe, but the problem with video streaming poses some challenges when pushed over a Wi-Fi connection.

The bottom line is, just as voice has requirements of pushing a lot of packets in sequence, video has the same requirement but at a larger scale and there are more packets and bigger packets. For a single dwelling, I’ve tested 1080i HD video streaming over 802.11g with success, but for a similar solution for an entire community over WiMAX, I’m not sure how well that will work.

AT&T’s U-Verse service broadcasts video over IP but there is no wireless component. I don’t know of anyone who is happily using the U-Verse service, but if you are, please chime in and give us an update.

Here is an article of interest from FAQ’s section on Wimax.com about hi definition video over WiMAX

VoFi stands for Voice over Wi-Fi. Whenever you use your VoIP connection over a wireless connection, you are using VoFI. Do you have people connecting to the network via Wi-Fi connection and then using a soft phone to make a call? Then you are using VoFi.

For a few people, a regular data Wi-Fi connection works fine, but when you are planning on rolling out VoFI for a large number of people, a shared data Wi-Fi connection will not work.

To successfully use a Wi-Fi connection you need to make sure your corporate wireless connection has high bandwidth to host voice connections, low lag times and fewer hops. You may need a higher number of access points if you plan on using voice over the connection compared to plain data.

You can get away with using VLANs on same access points, some companies go a step further and setup a totally separate network for voice. Normally if a company is using 802.11b/g for data, they might want to consider using 802.11a for voice since they use different frequencies and this minimizes any chance of interference.

The best thing you can do is to perform an extensive and comprehensive wireless survey before rolling out VoFI. Take care of all the problem zones and if at all possible have a separate Wi-Fi infrastructure for voice side. Using a 802.11a connection would be better for voice and/or video since this standard offers more bandwidth and is less interference prone compared to the 802.11b/g standard.