The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved the 802.11r Wi-Fi protocol, which allows Wi-Fi enabled devices to pass between WLAN access points more quickly.

The new standard aims to improve the quality and security of VoIP services. With existing protocols, swapping from one access point to another takes considerable amount of time.

The 802.11r standard, also known as Fast Basic Service Set Transition, takes less than 50 milliseconds to enable the security authentication of the service, during the course of switching over. This is less than half the time taken by existing standards.

The 802.11r standard was developed in 2004 and approval for publishing the final draft of the standard was given by the 802.11r task group in January.