John Sterlicchi | April 29, 2008
VENDORS still face great scepticism as they try to persuade businesses that enterprise-wide all-wireless networks are feasible.
Current deployments of WLAN infrastructure are based on 802.11a/b/g technology.
Many enterprises have installed wireless networks based on this standard, but they are generally seen as a convenience for users and not a replacement for the wired LAN.
Forrester Research says in a recent report that current 802.11a/b/g infrastructure will not provide a user experience that equates to the wired experience when trying to transmit more than the commodity data of email, contracts and calendaring due to its disparity in initial speed, often exacerbated by an influx of users on the network.
The current technology is, however, adequate to support voice and can address areas where wiring is not possible or extremely difficulty, the firm says.
"All enterprises face many technology investments and application decisions as they move towards a goal of ubiquitous mobility," Forrester analyst Chris Silva writes.
"More than 55 per cent of enterprises are making use of in-house deployed wireless LANs, but the scale of deployments in these organisations varies greatly."
According to Silva, the most common whinges against wireless are reliability and security, along, of course, with the costs, but industry watchers point to the arrival of the 802.11n standard, which is expected to be ratified by the IEEE later this year. They predict it will tempt customers to think wireless by default.
Motorola, which recently commissioned an enterprise WLAN study, says almost four out of 10 respondents are planning to deploy 802.11n technology in the next 12 months.
The number of enterprises planning to use WLANs as their main network will more than double in the next 12 months, growing from 8 per cent to 17 per cent. Motorola, along with competitors Columbitech and NetMotion Wireless, provide VPN access through a client that manages a connection regardless of network disconnects and also manages transitions between multiple networks so the switch is seamless to the user.
Motorola, for example, has introduced a tri-radio 802.11n access point, the AP-7131, which integrates three 802.11n radios that simultaneously support high-speed client access, mesh backhaul and dedicated dual-band intrusion protection for enabling the all-wireless enterprise.
According to Motorola, the AP-7131 can be used as a standalone AP in small to medium businesses, and in adaptive mode it combines the benefits of central management and site survivability to reduce the complexity of deployments in remote offices.
In a campus WLAN switch environment, the AP-7131 can be centrally managed for large-scale deployments.
Another big player in the market for enterprise wireless network equipment, Cisco Systems, has slipped slightly in market share in the past year, Gartner says, while Aruba Networks and Motorola/Symbol gained users.
Gartner is predicting that by year-end 2011, 70 per cent of all new worldwide voice and data client-to-LAN connections will be wireless. Cisco added to its arsenal of products with the introduction of several devices for branch office and small businesses, including two low-cost Integrated Services Routers.
The new Cisco 880 and 860 ISRs provide integrated lightweight access points supporting Cisco Unified Wireless and IEEE 802.11n wireless local area network (LAN) technology, 3G wireless WAN support for improved high availability and specialised support for managed services, including managed voice and Session Initiation Protocol.
Meanwhile, the widespread availability of WiMAX has for years been just around the corner, its supporters say, but non-interoperable uses and frequency spectrum licensing issues have hindered deployments.
The situation for enterprises is different, however.
According to Aruba Networks, WiMAX is a convenient alternative to wire backhaul for remote or personal access points and combined with WiFi can help an enterprise cost-effectively accommodate diverse backhaul requirements and extend wireless LAN services to hard-to-wire locations.
"Proponents of WiMAX make claims about in-process trials but there are few, if any, large-scale commercial networks," says Peter Thornycroft, author of an Aruba white paper, It Takes Two to Tango: Using WiFi and WiMAX to Deliver Broadband Wireless Services to Fixed and Mobile Clients.
"As a technology WiMAX is ready for takeoff, but it is the non-technical obstacles that have conspired to keep it grounded."
According to Thornycroft, WiFi and WiMAX do not inhabit discrete parts of the market but instead overlap and represent two of many competing ways to deliver broadband wireless services to fixed and mobile clients.
"While the two share common underlying technology, each has strengths and weaknesses associated with transit power, channel bandwidth, spectral bands, antenna gain and management regimes," he says.
Many network managers are embracing wireless, but management shortcomings are keeping it in a secondary role. Until management capabilities catch up with the wireless technology, industry watchers expect companies to rely mainly on the wired network for critical services.