The wireless wave has swept through colleges, hospitals, factory floors, retailers, downtowns, hot spots and the home, but it's still just lapping at the edges of traditional enterprise office environments. As the original 802.11 standard approaches its 10th birthday, concerns about wireless security and management overhead keep the technology's popularity in highly mobile "tile niches" from spilling over into enterprise "carpeted areas" and industries.

Carpeted-area wireless LAN (WLAN) deployments continue to face some significant roadblocks. Most of the employees who occupy these areas work at desks, and few have laptops. The low penetration of laptops replacing traditional office desktops is an inherent limitation and many companies continue to see them - and Wi-Fi - more as a convenience than a business necessity. The risks continue to outweigh the benefits by a significant margin.

To check the Wi-Fi pulse of the industry, Network World recently touched base with nine companies in various stages of WLAN adoption, ranging from no-wireless policies to aggressive rollouts.

One Wi-Fi skeptic is Blue Cross of Idaho, a representative of the carpet-heavy insurance industry. Most employees work at desks with wired access, and very few have laptop computers. Except for one mobile training area, a strict no-wireless policy is enforced by Network Chemistry's RFprotect monitoring technology.

"We wouldn't shy away from wireless if we identified a real business need for it, but we just haven't seen one on the campus," says Jan Marshall, manager of technical and network services for the Blue Cross/Blue Shield franchise. "The amount of manpower required to keep a wired network secure and working is much less," he adds.