You've come a long way, baby
When I began writing this newsletter 11 years ago, wireless was a completely different animal than it is today.
Wireless LANs, for example, were aimed primarily at replacing expensive cabling to connect desktop computers to LAN resources. They had little to do with mobility except in some warehouses and other niche deployments.
ARCHIVE: Wireless newsletter
In fact, most of the wireless focus back then was on trying to get respectable bandwidth in the mobile WAN — something faster than Cellular Digital Packet Data’s 19.2Kbps rates — so that data applications of some substance could get off the ground.
What’s transpired over the past decade has been magical. In early 2000, the 802.11b standard had only been ratified for a few months, bumping WLAN theoretical speeds from 2Mbps to 11Mbps. Today, of course, 802.11n access points with three spatial streams support up to 900Mbps connect rates, and enterprises can scale their WLANs to hundreds or thousands of access points with central provisioning and management.
In fact, WLANs, in many organizations, have displaced cabled Ethernet in the access network segment. So users can pretty much work wherever they want.
Mobile WANs are embarking on their fourth generation, with multimegabit speeds now available to support the plethora of mobile devices that continue to arrive in a steady stream. After a number of false starts, mobile applications now finally have the device smarts, the device power and the network capacity they need to thrive.
Mobility is at the core of pretty much everything. At least some Star Trekkian fantasies have become reality; just witness a healthcare worker with a Vocera communications badge.
I mention all this progress as a way of sharing with you that my last Wireless in the Enterprise/Wireless Alert newsletter will publish next week. It’s been a pleasure walking this wireless path with you, seeing so many problems from data encryption flaws to RF management challenges being solved right and left by the wireless wizards in this industry.
There remain wireless trials and tribulations, of course. There’s never enough spectrum and there’s always worry over the potential, but as yet unproven, health effects of all the radiation.
Meantime, there are practical, everyday concerns, too, such as mobile device management. IT is still figuring out how to embrace the influx of consumer-grade devices into the enterprise with the provisioning, security and control it requires.
On that note, be advised that the 2011 Mobile Device Management Challenge, involving six of the industry’s top vendors, will publish at Network World during the first week of October to teach you more about that entire facet of mobility. Please watch for it. It includes an introduction co-authored by me, as well as some audio panel discussions that I moderate.
And if you want to find me come October, here are a few of my online haunts:
* https://communities.motorola.com/community/wireless-insights/reflections
* https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/network-briefs (sign up for wireless!)
* https://twitter.com/#!/doandie
But wait! There’s still one newsletter left to publish on Sept. 27. That one will contain a fun exercise to see how much you’ve learned in this space over the past 11 years. Enjoy it!
