As the official standards process bogs down, more companies are taking the plunge and deploying pre-standard gear
Her dilemma – whether to dive headlong into an emerging networking technology or stick with proven standards that may be more stable and reliable but offer less performance and a shorter life span – is nothing new to technology professionals.
Morrisville State College could have used its 300 wireless LAN access points for many more years. But the 8-year-old gear used an IEEE standard that the market never embraced, and the hundreds of Vista-based laptops that students started buying through the upstate New York college in August didn’t have drivers for the long-since orphaned branch of the 802.11 evolutionary tree.
“We were looking at a forklift upgrade,” says Jean Borland, vice president for technology services at the school, well known for its pioneering deployment of the still-unfinished 802.11n WLAN standard earlier this year. (See 802.11n wireless LAN tests show ‘unbelievable’ results at state college.)
To Borland, the decision to go with the new technology, well in advance of ratification of the standard by IEEE — expected in 2009 — was the quintessential no-brainer. Though they worked well on campus for the past eight years, its access points from Raytheon, which used the original 802.11 2Mbps “frequency popping spread spectrum” standard, were “end of life products,” she says. And because the college needed a wholesale upgrade, buying 802.11g gear that is about to be superseded by the new 802.11n standard made no sense. (Compare wireless security products.)
“I cannot justify spending money on what I view as another end-of-life product, which would be any flavor of a, b or g,” Borland says.
Her dilemma — whether to dive headlong into an emerging networking technology or stick with proven standards that may be more stable and reliable but offer less performance and a shorter life span — is nothing new to technology professionals. Yet as the standards process increasingly bogs down (see Is the IEEE standards process broken?) and is outstripped by both enterprise needs and the availability of pre-standard products from reputable vendors (see Wireless vendors target enterprise nets with 802.11n products), the conventional wisdom that corporations should wait for ratified standards and a full marketplace shakeout is facing new challenges.
Support the draft
“I can’t think of any reason not to,” says analyst Craig Mathias, principal of wireless consulting firm Farpoint Group, about deploying products that implement the latest draft of the forthcoming 802.11n standard, known as draft 2. “The question is, if you’re going to put in a wireless LAN, and you don’t want to buy [802].11n, what are you going to buy? .11g? .11a?”
While those technologies still work and have a huge installed base of users, the new technology offers three to five times the performance for only about twice as much money, plus it provides backward compatibility with the established wireless standards. “The price/performance is much, much better,” he adds. “Worst case, you operate your shiny new ‘n’ stuff in backwards compatibility mode with .11g until you upgrade your installed base to ‘n.’ But to me it doesn’t make sense to purchase old, established product when new product is available.”
That’s an increasingly popular view, yet still a minority one. Most large enterprises maintain a conservative approach to deploying new technologies. Not only do they wait for formally standardized products to reach the market, but they typically avoid the first generation of a new technology while early adopters and their vendors smooth out all the glitches. Like the tortoise whose slow and steady plodding wins the race over the speedy hare, these organizations minimize the risks of problems or even failures by forgoing leading edge capabilities and performance.
“We don’t have a formal written policy on pre-standards deployments, just an unwritten reluctance,” says Charlie Spencer, a network analyst at Union Switch & Signal in Batesburg, S.C. “In the IT department where I work, the general consensus is don’t buy anything in beta, or before the standard is established, or [any] new technology within the first six months of its release unless it’s business-critical. Let someone else do the ‘gamma testing.'”
Union Switch & Signal has invested heavily in 802.11g hardware over the past two years, and probably won’t consider 802.11n equipment for at least three more. “We continue to purchase 11g client hardware, so 11n access points would be overkill,” he adds.
Aside from the added time and effort it typically takes to get pre-standard products up and running smoothly, and in particular interoperating with legacy gear, more conservative IT shops fear changes in an evolving standard that might require significant upgrades to the products they buy or worse, obsolescence if the final standard were to deviate too far from the current draft.
“My opinion is rooted in … the old Sony Betamax vs. VHS fiasco, where the technologically superior format lost out as a de facto standard to the better marketed device,” Spencer says.
The safe approach remains the conventional wisdom throughout corporate IT departments across most industries. It’s particularly prevalent in businesses such as financial services, healthcare, telecommunications and others in which system uptime translates directly into dollars and cents, or lives saved.
Yet the ranks of early adopters such as Morrisville State College seem to be growing. As the process for developing standards continues to slow — the IEEE 802.11n standard for 100Mbps WLANs was originally slated for completion last year but will take at least another year or more to ratify — both vendors and users grow weary of the wait.
In the case of the higher-speed, longer-range successor to the 802.11g WLAN standard, demand has been sufficient to drive vendors to target enterprises with access points and other gear that implements draft 2 of the unfinished 802.11n standard. And early adopters are taking the plunge.
“The risks with all pre-standard deployments are the usual radical changes that require a forklift,” says Bob Johnson, director of communications infrastructure at Duke University in Durham, N.C., which recently deployed 10 draft-n wireless access points from Cisco. Duke is confident, however, that the new access points are backwardly compatible with its installed wireless gear, just as 802.11g was able to work with clients that implemented the predecessor ‘a’ and ‘b’ versions of the standard. “While we see ‘n’ on the client side becoming more prevalent, the existing installed base of b/g/n will need to be supported for some time as the natural refresh cycles play out,” Johnson says.
Though the university is on the cutting edge when it comes to implementing technologies to support student activities, it also has operations, such as the Duke University Health System, for which the conservative approach is required.
“You will often see challenges when making next generation decisions, be it pre-standard — like the early VoIP [Session Initiation Protocol] standard formalization — or competing technologies, like cellular vs. Wi-Fi,” Johnson says. “Sometimes, with critical technology like voice for the University and the Health System, you choose to wait to do wholesale change outs until the maturity level is there along with support on the street.”
Duke has a track record of embracing leading-edge technologies for niche applications, while deploying only tried-and-true technology for the critical ones.
And the university is not without scars from instances when it got too close to the bleeding edge. It made an early investment in IPTV under the assumption that students would rather watch television on their laptops, rather than on 200-pound TVs cabled to the wall and shared with a roommate. “Turned out the population was not quite ready for that,” Johnson admits.
Another university that is taking the 802.11n plunge is the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., which plans to install draft 2 access points in a new addition to its science hall in the spring. The risk that the pre-standard gear won’t be easily upgradeable to the final standard is “minor,” according to Geno Schlichting, the university’s telecommunications specialist, who compared it with the school’s early deployment of VoIP and category 5/5e copper cabling before the standards were finalized. Both of those trail-blazing implementations performed well and without significant glitches.
“The university tries not to be on the bleeding edge, but we also don’t wait for something to be the blunt edge either,” Schlichting says.
The U.S. Department of Defense and other federal government agencies also maintain a hybrid approach to adopting new technologies, insisting on and even driving standards development, for critical infrastructure such as IPv6 (see Feds back go slow approach on IPv6), while blazing the trail with other technologies, such as the Defense Department’s pioneering adoption of RFID.
“We often tested and evaluated what you’re calling pre-standard technology,” says Steve Cooper, former CIO of the American Red Cross, who previously served as the first CIO of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “If we found it to be applicable to business and national needs, we would deploy it in a controlled pilot mode to evaluate its use in operational environments and conditions.”
One class of enterprise that may be bucking the trend toward more aggressive use of pre-standard technology are law firms and other professional services businesses, which have traditionally been driven more by the whims of senior partners than standards and corporate IT policy.
“If our partners truly want something, we ultimately deploy it whether it’s standard or not,” says Frank Gillman, chief technology officer at Allen Matkins Leck Gamble & Mallory LLP, a Los Angeles law firm with approximately 230 attorneys practicing out of seven offices in California. Yet like other professional services organizations, law firms are increasingly seeing the need for better corporate governance, including a standards-based IT strategy, he adds.
“Because of the unique corporate structure, law firms tend not to be organizations that adhere completely to corporate governance,” Gillman explains. “But in the last two or three years, professional service firms have started to recognize that in order to be successful, you have to align your technology decisions to your overall business goals. And they’re becoming much more accepting of corporate policies and corporate guidelines.”
