monica.paolini posted on December 16, 2011 18:02
A paper I wrote on the future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise just came out on GigaOM Pro. It was fun to write as it gave me the opportunity to think not only about the future of Wi-Fi, but also about its past. It is really impressive how flexible Wi-Fi as a technology has been to adapt to an increasingly diverse set of requirements in the market. Who would have thought that Wi-Fi, initially developed as technology to complement wireline connectivity in educational and corporate environments would eventually be the darling of mobile operators worldwide? Who would have thought that the technology initially secured by WEP would be adopted by the military? But perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that there is a long future ahead of it.
More on the paper (available
here):
Despite the fast adoption of mobile broadband, Wi-Fi is still the predominant wireless access technology today for most of us. The technology has shown a remarkable ability to evolve, to meet increasingly higher expectations and requirements, and to become pervasively adopted in mobile devices. All of these factors are highly prized by the enterprise and public and safety agencies, as well as health and educational institutions that are increasingly deploying larger, high-performance and high-capacity Wi-Fi networks that have become fully integrated within the IT infrastructure.
This paper follows the ascent of Wi-Fi and looks at how its expanding role within the enterprise drives more-advanced requirements. We also examine how these requirements will be met by further expansion in the Wi-Fi standards and by a new generation of Wi-Fi equipment and devices. And we discuss how the enterprise can benefit from the evolution of Wi-Fi by deploying future-proof networks that will organically improve performance.