In a conversation last week with Frank Hanzlik, the managing director of the Alliance, he said that the almost 2000 products the group has tested in the last five years is exciting, but it may only be the start as Wi-Fi migrates into phones and consumer electronics.

He feels that electronics will be the key growth area, especially after seeing so many products with Wi-Fi at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last January. "Just walking around on the floor, it was hard not to bump into Wi-Fi," he said.

Cellular convergence is the other growth area, which comes as little to surprise to anyone following the industry buzz of the last few months. Talking about the CTIA Wireless 2005 show in New Orleans in March, Hanzlik said "We were happy to see just about all the handset folks had at least one product with Wi-Fi, either formally at their booth or behind the scenes."

However, he thinks it will still take some time for the market to develop. He cites a Senza Fili Consulting forecast that pegs North America's use of Wi-Fi/Cellular Convergence (WCC) at around only a few million in the next two years, but 30 million users by the year 2010, in an segment worth $1.6 billion in just the United States. He calls the forecast "conservative."

He's not worried about any thing like cellular or 3G becoming a competitor to Wi-Fi, calling the technologies complimentary. "At a panel at CTIA, that was a key theme the audience was resonating with. We're moving in the right direction."

WCC means using voice traffic over Wi-Fi networks (VoWi-Fi, occasionally known as VoFi), which doesn't seem much of a stretch to Hanzlik considering the number of Wi-Fi networks that already exist. Adding voice to them is a given. Though maybe not so much at home, where he said services like Vonage already have attractive pricing, and it's going to take a while for Wi-Fi phone handsets to get affordable enough for home use, though he said "there is interest in using VoWi-Fi to replace cordless phones."

The Alliance has its own internal WCC task group that is "chartered to support [the] cellular industry's unique certification requirements," by taking the Alliance's PC centric certification and "morph it into something that works for devices that have different operating system requirements, performance requirements, that benefit from measured radio frequency specifications." While he would not share details, he said some of their work has been done in collaboration with other industry trade associations including the CTIA.

"Convergence is good, and it's beyond the scope of any one company or organization. We have to collaborate," said Hanzlik.

Click here to read full article on Wi-Fi Planet