In 2008, the enterprise wireless LAN will be reinvented, at least for those enterprises where mobility is a requirement rather than a convenience.

Driving the change is the arrival of WLAN products based on the draft 2 IEEE 802.11n standard, which enterprises have already started to factor into their wireless plans. Some companies looking at large-scale deployments or updates of WLANs over the next 12 months are seriously weighing the use of 11n products, which promise data rates of 300Mbps and throughput of 150M to 180Mbps.

The contrast with conventional WLAN gear, with a maximum data rate of 54Mbps and throughput of less than half that, is so dramatic that at least some enterprises are willing to pay a premium for 11n gear, and adopt a not-quite-standard technology on the assumption that any changes in the 11n standard can be dealt with via software updates.

A summer 2007 survey of 195 IT professionals, by WLAN vendor Colubris, found that 44% planned eventually to deploy 11n and that one-third of them thought 11n could replace wired Ethernet for client connectivity.

Just as important as greater throughput is greater reliability and consistency in connectivity and performance, due in part to 11n's multiple antenna technology called multiple input multiple output (MIMO). For the first time, 11n makes feasible the idea of confidently relying on the WLAN as the primary means of client access to the network. (Read Network World's test of early 11n gear targeted at the SOHO market.) 

Still, there are plenty of issues still to wrestle with. The adoption of 11n will in a few cases force enterprises to beef up their edge switches to support Gigabit Ethernet. To get the full benefit of 11n capacity, they may have to upgrade existing power-over-Ethernet infrastructures to the new 802.3at standard, barely entering the market at the close of 2007. WLAN management software from some vendors may be lagging behind the hardware rollouts, a troubling shortcoming at least in the short term.

So far, higher education seems to be leading the way in 11n adoption. Morrisville State College in rural New York created the first large-scale 11n deployment in October with about 800 access points from Meru Networks. Shortly after, Carnegie Mellon University announced a huge upgrade to its aging campus WLAN: They plan to deploy about 3,000 11n access points from both Aruba Networks and Xirrus during 2008. The Xirrus 11n WLAN “arrays” (which combine in one unit multiple access points, a switch, and the vendor's special sectorized directional antenna) are so new that the university is one of the beta test sites.