* Vo-Fi usage, centralized WLAN management to grow
We seldom see much publicly available end-user research on deployment and application trends these days. Infonetics Research, however, recently conducted a survey about enterprise plans for using wireless LANs and made a few data points public. (Thanks, Infonetics!)
The firm’s resulting “User Plans for Wireless LANs: North America 2005” report predicts, among other trends, an uptake in wireless voice and a bigger shift to centralized Wi-Fi management in the near-term. The company recently surveyed 240 organizations of all sizes using or planning to use WLANs by 2006 across five vertical markets.
Infonetics anticipates that the number of organizations deploying voice over wireless LANs will triple over the next two years, from 10% of organizations now to 31% in 2007. This might seem dramatic. But when you consider that Vo-Fi usage is fairly low now, the data point isn’t all that surprising. Also, the study doesn’t specify the degree to which deployments constitute pockets of usage or enterprise-wide installations.
Also, adopters wishing to install Vo-Fi broadly in very large implementations have latency issues to work out related to roaming among access points. The now-ratified 802.11e standard solves many quality-of-service issues as they relate to many clients associating with a single access point, but not inter- access-point issues, which will rely on vendor-proprietary solutions and other 802.11 standards, such as components of 802.11i (security), and emerging 802.11r (roaming) and 802.11k (radio resource management) specs to speed up handoffs.
And while the prioritization component of 802.11e has been available in products for some time, the new Scheduled Access (SA) component still must find its way into products and be interoperability-tested by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The alliance says it will begin SA interoperability testing late in the first quarter or early in the second quarter of 2006.
Infonetics also reported that 44% of its survey respondents deploy and manage their access points separately, without the use of WLAN switches. This makes sense, paralleling nicely with Cisco’s approximate share of the enterprise WLAN market, which has hovered between 40% and 50% for the past several years.
However, Infonetics’ data says that this distributed management approach will decline by 2007, as centralized control architectures gain traction and the number of WLAN switch ports deployed grows significantly (and, likely, as Cisco’s acquisition of WLAN switch-maker Airespace finds its sea legs).
