Judging from the hype around wireless LAN (WLAN) technology, you'd think the rest of the IT industry had lain down and gone into hibernation. Yet the enthusiasm over this fast-growing technology is not entirely undeserved. Thanks largely to economies of scale that have commoditised WLAN technology, wireless is delivering enough real benefits to have rocketed to the top of many companies' IT wish lists.
Analyst firm IDC has forecast that the worldwide market for wireless and mobile infrastructure services will reach US$37.42 billion by 2006 - representing nearly 15 per cent growth year on year.
That such steady growth could happen despite the ongoing slowdown in IT spending speaks volumes for the perceived importance of wireless technology. Indeed, in applications where earlier, proprietary wireless technologies have been well entrenched - for example, warehouse automation and retail stocktaking - the improvement in data quality, data entry speed and worker efficiency have often been remarkable.
WLANs were once restricted to small areas within a company, often installed within one workgroup but not officially sanctioned within corporate IT strategy. But now that those deployments have proved themselves and attracted the attention of higher-ups, the technology has hit the mainstream. Wireless mobility now forms the basis of ambitious business plans in which ubiquitous, wireless access promises a completely new way of working.
Faster, faster
Wireless technology is a moving target, progressing just as quickly as companies' implementation plans seek to nail it down. The increased focus on wireless R&D has brought a whole host of improvements to the technology. For example, the rapid move from 11 Mbps 802.11b-compliant wireless to the 54 Mbps 802.11a standard was seen only occasionally last year, but it is rapidly becoming common in 2003.
Simply writing 802.11a support into future planning has, of course, proved far too simple for an industry that's grown up on competing versions of the truth. Proponents of the evolving 802.11g standard, which is available now in pre-standard products and should be standardised within several months, are pointing to its backwards compatibility with 802.11b WLANs as a major persuader for companies deciding their wireless path.
This compatibility comes from the fact that 802.11g-based WLANs run in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz radio frequency spectrum just like 802.11b. This makes it incompatible with 802.11a, which uses the far less congested 5 GHz spectrum but is said to consume more power, be more easily intercepted by walls and other objects, and have half the range of 802.11b. This effectively means that 802.11a networks require a higher density of access points than their 802.11b counterparts.
One of the first Australian users of 802.11a WLAN technology was Brisbane Boys College (BBC), which began exploring the technology as it planned the data infrastructure in its recently renovated senior school. Last year, BBC began experimenting with an 802.11b WLAN in its primary school, but found that the shared bandwidth quickly petered out as more and more students came online.
Some 800 computers, spread across more than a dozen computer labs within BBC, are connected using conventional data cabling. But Afzal Shariff, Director of IT at BBC, believes the company's investment in 802.11a wireless technology - implemented using five Cisco Systems base stations and PC Cards installed in 30 laptops available for student loan - will extend the network into senior school classrooms without requiring costly and restrictive fixed cabling to be run into each classroom.
"The idea was to not put conventional cabling all along the classrooms," Shariff explains. "Most of our curriculum is going digital. In our future planning, each student will have a laptop. Wireless provides a seamless connection as we'd hoped, and it's saved the cost of cabling and the hassle of fault finding on the cables."
Ultimately, the choice of 802.11a or 802.11g will become a non-issue as the proliferation of dual-standard equipment heads off that dispute at the pass. Just as 10/100 MBps ethernet adapters provided companies with a migration path from conventional to fast ethernet, dual-standard wireless PC cards are quickly becoming common. By next year, expect there to be very few WLAN devices without support for both 802.11a and 802.11g (and, by extension, 802.11b).
This charge will no doubt be led by the integration of wireless connectivity into most laptops, particularly notebook and tablet PCs based on Intel's much-vaunted, power-frugal Centrino technology. As such devices become commonplace and fly onto corporate desktops at the end of the next upgrade cycle, wireless access will simply become ubiquitous.
Building the wireless WAN
Ubiquitous within the office, that is. Outside the office, maintaining connectivity is presenting some quite different challenges as mobile data carriers jockey for marketing position in the creation of wireless wide area network (WWAN) services. Just as wireless PC cards will combine support for the two WLAN standards, expansion cards such as Nokia's D211 are taking the integration story to a new level by supporting both WLAN and GPRS (general packet radio service).
Support for GPRS, also available through standalone PC cards from Vodafone and Optus, will allow wireless users to roam off the office network and stay connected at much slower speeds - but connected nonetheless. With the proliferation of 802.11b services - now being rolled out across major cities the world over - the wireless footprint a year from now should be significant enough that mobile users won't have to travel far to get higher-speed access to their company networks. When they're driving or otherwise away from a hotspot, data will still trickle in via GPRS.
In the mobile computing vision, the duality of WAN access will allow people to remain in constant contact via low-bandwidth communications methods such as instant messaging. If they need more bandwidth, they can simply go to the nearest wireless hotspot and get it without blinking an eye. One of the first devices to make this a reality is Symbol Technologies' PDT 8000, a ruggedised PDA that combines GPRS and WLAN connectivity to provide seamless WLAN and WWAN access.
Carriers are counting on such devices to become increasingly common within large corporate customers. Peter Acheson, Director of Business Mobile for Optus Mobile, sees the hotspot market as an inexpensive, potentially lucrative opportunity to complement GPRS with high-speed access. "We see them as being linked," Acheson explained shortly after the launch of the company's Mobile Connect hotspot network.
"At the end of the day, wireless for corporates is about the ability to access applications at high speed on mobile devices - whether PDA, laptop or mobile phone. Whether connected via hotspot or GPRS, customers will still be in the wireless data session, albeit at a lower speed. They will adapt their behaviour - for example, by not opening large attachments while writing an email in the cab on the way to the airport."
This may sound like a great vision, but in coming months it will become a bit more complicated as Telstra and Hutchison respectively roll out their CDMA 1x and 3G data services. Determined to make a play at GPRS' growing market, Telstra is pushing its faster CDMA-based technology by offering a range of third-party devices.
Hutchison, which will need to quickly ramp up usage of its network to stay viable, will have to rapidly respond in kind in order to convince business customers that 3G is worth the extra expense. For both companies, success will ultimately depend on how effectively they can market add-on devices integrating 802.11a and 802.11g WLAN standards with their respective WWAN technologies.
They already have a high standard to live up to. GPRS may lack the speed of CDMA 1x and 3G, but it's available anywhere that GSM mobile service is running. When it comes to the wireless WAN, after all, pervasiveness can be even more important than data speeds - and in this respect it's still going to be a long time before GPRS is down for the count.
"We very much see 3G as a 2004 proposition," says Acheson, who was unimpressed by the early 3G devices he saw at the recent 3G World Congress in France. "What I saw at Cannes confirms to me that the devices aren't ready, and there are going to be big issues in 2003 with device compatibility. If applications and content are not ready, there's no point having a 3G network, whatever the speed."
Just getting started
While carriers work on providing the plumbing to support increasingly mobile customers, technology providers are taking the ball and running with it. Recognising that pervasive wireless connectivity will be taken for granted in tomorrow's corporate world, vendors are pursuing an integration strategy that will see voice and video quickly join data on the airwaves of corporate Australia.
In January, for example, mobile communications company Motorola joined forces with networking vendor Avaya and wireless LAN giant Proxim to collaboratively develop new products combining WLAN, mobile data and voice communications. Other vendors are following suit, and within a short time such integrated devices will be flooding the market.
The addition of voice to wireless LANs is a common goal among vendors who have been pushing voice-data convergence on wired networks for years. Since conventional WLANs are based on IP, existing 'soft phones' generally work without modification over wireless networks. If a company has installed a VoIP-capable PABX, this capability means that any roaming user can make and receive phone calls - using their computer or PDA - as if they were sitting at their own desk.
Doing this en masse requires installation of a network management tool that's capable of ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) so voice quality doesn't degrade. As a rule of thumb, a conventional 802.11b compliant base station can support 8 to 10 simultaneous voice calls, and in a shared-bandwidth environment QoS capabilities ensure the quality of each call isn't compromised by congestion.
"The convergence we've been talking about for ages is definitely happening on the handheld side," says Suzanne Spenberg, Business Solutions Manager with Nokia Australia. "We see PDAs incorporating communications capabilities, and we're coming from the voice world to incorporate PDA capabilities. But there's still some lack of awareness of what the devices are capable of."
Early adopters of wireless technology are gradually cottoning on to its potential. Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology recently converted thousands of conventional phone extensions to VoIP and has been extending this across the expanding WLAN footprint on campus. This functionality allows staff and students to remain contactable via email, voice, instant messaging or other communication methods no matter where they roam.
Although today's wireless VoIP implementations generally rely on soft phones, growing hardware support for VoIP will fundamentally alter the structure of the humble mobile phone, facilitating the shift to a completely IP-based telephony and data infrastructure. Cordless IP phones are already available, and a wide variety of future devices will integrate native VoIP capabilities that will allow them to function similarly on high-speed WLANs or slower GPRS connections.
"Wireless VoIP is one of the hottest topics I've seen for quite a while with customers," says Roy Wakim, Convergence Solutions Manager with Avaya South Pacific. "The idea of using soft phones over PDAs is becoming more and more relevant; it makes business sense to have users with high numbers of PDAs to use the soft phone as a communications device. It's a lot cheaper than a DECT access point. And instead of just using mobility for data transfers, you can really take full advantage of it."
With appropriate security measures in place, VoIP-capable WLAN phones could even be taken into the field, with voice calls routed to the handset via GPRS or 802.11b. By simply adding a small webcam to the mix, it's entirely feasible for companies to offer employees full videoconferencing capabilities on both the WLAN and the WWAN.
Ultimately, of course, that's what wireless is all about: the freedom to communicate any way, any time, anywhere. By combining careful planning with the right technology, this freedom can drive significant business change throughout the company - and beyond.
