* Survey reveals enterprise trends and plans
The results are in from the annual Webtorials Wireless LAN State-of-the-Market survey, which was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2009, post-ratification of the 802.11n standard. A few interesting trends emerged, particularly regarding “all-wireless” plans (or lack thereof), customer satisfaction levels, architecture choices and that ever-elusive variable: voice.
As you might expect, the long-in-coming ratification of the 802.11n standard will spur greater Wi-Fi expansion by improving enterprise comfort levels with the stability of 802.11n products. Some 60% of the 272 respondents to this year’s survey, sponsored by Ruckus Wireless and conducted by Webtorials (with yours truly as the primary analyst), said they would expand their WLANs as a direct result of ratification.
Still, most respondents — who all were involved in some aspect of WLAN procurement, installation, management or operations for their companies — don’t see an all-wireless network in their companies’ futures anytime soon. Rather, they said they would always keep some wired access infrastructure in place.
In fact, just 10% said they would work toward creating an all-wireless LAN access network, and a mere 3% said they intended to install all-wireless networks in branch offices. The branch office results are particularly curious. Companies with lots of small branches, such as retailers and banks, could be up and running quickly and inexpensively across many sites using wireless. Perhaps the privacy compliance mandates for the retail and financial industries continue to give enterprises pause.
Another variable studied was what enterprises value most in Wi-Fi and how well the market is delivering. The top Wi-Fi characteristics respondents cited as critical were reliability (64%), security (61%) and performance (36%). Either respondents simply want to keep the industry on its toes or the industry has lots of room to improve: less than 20% of respondents said they were “extremely satisfied” with any of these Wi-Fi characteristics. Expectations and experiences match up best when it comes to performance: 32% of users said they were “very” satisfied compared to the 36% who consider performance a critical attribute.
To access the report free of charge, visit here (registration required). Next time: architectures and voice.
