* Many types of wireless networks can thrive
There are lots of wireless networks kicking around in various stages of development. Not that this is news to you. But it might be confusing.
My take is that there is room for many different types of networks and deployment approaches. But I’d challenge vendors and service providers to avoid getting so caught up in technology and feature wars that they forget to educate customers about the actual problems being solved by each kind of network and their products. Doing so will help enterprises harmonize the many innovations available to them into a successful grand plan.
It’s likely that at some point, whatever device we are toting around from workplace to destinations on the road to home will have multiple radios in it. Those radios might be 3G cellular (pick your flavor), 802.11a/b/g (Wi-Fi), and 802.16e (WiMAX), for example. Roaming and handoff technologies, be they Mobile IP, emerging 802.21 standard implementations or something else, will allow our devices to choose the “best” network for the application and geography at hand on our behalf in background mode as we move around.
Today, however, users choose services and build enterprise networks based on what’s available and achievable now. Why implement one type of network service, for example, over another?
Brand, price and whatnot do figure in the equation. But in business decisions, you have to first consider your application and the ROI of the users upon whom you will bestow what might be considered a pricey service today (e.g., $80 a month for an EV-DO or EDGE service). For some users, that service doesn’t pay. For others, it might be worth far more.
Take, for example, highly mobile real estate agents. They don’t generally hang out in Wi-Fi hot spots when they are showing properties to prospective buyers. The Multiple Listing Service, the realty industry’s Bible, contains photos of properties for sale. Some agencies allow their agents to view the photos with appended video “guided tours” of the properties via notebook computers over mobile networks.
That requires about 100K bit/sec of bandwidth – easily doable over a wireless LAN, if one is available. But if the agent’s car is the primary office space, 1XEV-DO or EDGE high-speed cellular services are probably a better fit.
That’s just one example. Over time, we’ll continue to investigate others in this newsletter.
