Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Weeding Through the Wi-Fi Hype

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 23:49:45 -0400

Mobile Professional
July 2003

Weeding Through the Wi-Fi Hype

Will access to a wireless
network set your mobile workers free?

By Jason Imber

Unless you've been living under a pile of spreadsheets, you can't help
but notice the media being saturated with a tremendous amount of hyperbole
about the various technologies that fall under the Wi-Fi label. In all
likelihood, this trend will not subside any time soon. At this stage, it is
not uncommon to see nouns like "revolution," "freedom," and "ubiquitous"
thrown around by a slew of companies large and small that are looking to get
in on the action. While these buzzwords-and the prospect of a workday that
is genuinely untethered from the restraints of the wired office network-are
enticing, the vast majority of today's workforce is not there yet.

Wild assertions aside, if your workers aren't using Wi-Fi now, it is a
safe bet that they will be 12 months from now. At that point, you may be
ready to kick yourself for not exploring it sooner. But before firing off a
memo to the head of your IT department requesting the immediate
implementation of a company-wide wireless LAN, let's examine the state of
the Wi-Fi marketplace today, where it is going, and how your business will
be able to take advantage of all it has to offer.

What is Wi-Fi?

While it goes by a number of different labels, including wireless LAN
and 802.11b (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' numeric
equivalent of one of the more common standard protocols associated with the
format), Wi-Fi is short for wireless fidelity and refers to a high-frequency
wireless connection. As a means to connect to the Internet, or your office
network without wires, it operates specifically in the 2.4GHz range, and
promises to offer connection speeds of up to 11MB per second-although
typical connection speeds are about half of that. Most users, however, will
not notice an appreciable difference in access quality at the
less-than-advertised speed. And while those throughput speeds have been good
enough for most adopters of the technology, there is the promise of even
greater speeds with the 802.11g standard.

The one area where limitations are most significant regarding
networking via Wi-Fi is literally that of distance, or the proximity of your
Wi-Fi-friendly device to the access point that connects to the network,
whether it be your wireless LAN or the Internet. Yes, your employees will be
working wirelessly, but within very strict boundaries. "As you move closer
and closer to the barrier, bandwidth, in theory, is going to decrease," says
Bob Morrow, senior director of sales consulting for XcelleNet in Atlanta,
Ga.

It might be easiest to think of a Wi-Fi footprint as an invisible
fence for a laptop: workers can move around quite freely, and never need to
use another Ethernet cable, but if they go past the perimeter available to
them, their access might suddenly be cut off. Equally, physical obstructions
between the device and the access point can also limit connectivity.

High Security

Fortunately, concerns regarding potential security risks associated
with using a wireless LAN are being addressed. This is not to say that your
mobile workers shouldn't take precautions when either signing on to a
network at an access point as an individual user, or when setting up a
wireless network for your company. Rather, this suggests that fears about
the lack of security when using Wi-Fi are finally being put to rest.

Wi-Fi often makes use of a security protocol known as wired-equivalent
privacy or WEP, but there are those who will argue that this is something of
a misnomer. As XcelleNet's Morrow points out, "The fact that data is
travelling over a radio signal creates an opportunity for a hacker to access
it." As much as anything else, he suggests that the question of security is
an awareness issue for any IT department deploying a wireless network. "If
you have a WEP network and it is not secure, someone who drives by within
access could get into the network," Morrow says; however, he notes that new
security standards will be coming out to improve upon what already exists.

Why is Wi-Fi so hot?

A large part of it is simply what Wi-Fi represents on a symbolic level
to the mobile professional. According to David Juittt, CTO of Bluesocket,
based in Burlington, Mass., there is a fundamental take-away that needs to
be appreciated when thinking about Wi-Fi. "There is not a really good
understanding of what Wi-Fi means to someone, but it means freedom," he
says. "It is an untethering of your ability to get your job done, where
[previously] you used to be tied to your desk to get to the network."

This has literally begun to create a paradigm shift in the way we
approach technology. Rather than us being required to be physically
connected to a network, and to plug into it, now the network will come to
us. On the surface, this might not seem like that big of a deal. But once we
stop to think about it, we can't help but appreciate the subtle changes this
could mean in the way that we do work. Sales people won't need to be trapped
in an office (or a cubicle) for hours on end so that they can simply have
access to their internal office network. The various bits of information
that come to us during the workday, whether e-mails or sales presentations,
will be available wirelessly. And while that might not necessarily be at a
local café where we'll be sipping a steamy latte, it will, at least in
theory, be where we want to access the information.

It is at this point that words like "freedom" start to ring true. And
while one might argue that this will mean a loss of control for the
employer, because managers won't know if their employees are getting their
work done or if they're just surfing the Net on company time, it might make
more sense to view this as an opportunity to enhance productivity. Without
the restraints of a typical workday, employees may find themselves working
at times and places that they previously had not even considered. Is this a
utopian work-world view? Maybe it is, but the fact remains that wireless
access to the Web and corporate networks is not going away.

Enter Centrino

A large part of the recent upshot associated with Wi-Fi needs to be
attributed to Intel, and its release this past spring of Centrino
technology, which marries a microprocessor to 802.11 technology. Going
forward, this wireless connectivity will be hard-wired into all Intel-based
laptop computers. By the end of this year, you realistically won't be able
to purchase a new laptop without it.

And if your existing equipment doesn't have a wireless radio built
into it already, you can now acquire them for less than $100 each. Where
equipment costs had been a barrier to entry even a year ago for some
companies, at the current price points available that argument quickly
vanishes.

In the case of Centrino, Intel is aiming to promote the notion of
"occasionally connected computing," that is, "being able to continue working
even when there is no network connection available," says Chris Thomas,
chief strategist for Intel's solutions market development group based in
Santa Clara, Calif. The basic idea being that you should not be bound by a
network connection in order to accomplish your tasks. Thomas argues that
mobile professionals should be able to work offline, re-sync their notebooks
to the network later-when the time is right for them-and find that the PC
and its software are doing the heavy lifting for them. At that point, "how
we do work is a function of our lifestyle, and not the computer we are
tethered to," he says. "Instead of being the culprit, the computer is the
helper. Our lifestyle and our workstyle is more important than our computing
architecture."

As an example, Thomas cites the idea of an individual looking for a
sales presentation that can be used with a potential customer. He notes that
it is highly labor-intensive work to search for documents residing within a
corporate network, downloading it to see what it really is and then deciding
whether or not it is even appropriate for the need in question. Now consider
a wireless alternative, tied in to a Web-services-based approach such as the
one that Intel developed with Iona Technologies and Macromedia to deliver
information in more of a catalogue-like approach. The end-user can download
the information when needed, subscribe to it as an XML-based feed and then
get each new iteration of the material as it becomes available, without
needing to go back and look for updates on his own. All of this is made
easier via a wireless connection. Thomas expects that the labor savings for
individuals and the residual cost savings for businesses will be enormous.

"The promise is that it will help people make constructive use of
their downtime, and eliminate or mask the distinction between being
connected and not," says Patrick D. O'Brien, VP of corporate strategy for
Iona in Waltham, Mass. Much of this involves making modifications in the
very workflow processes that are currently in place, and using the
intelligence built into the technology to optimize the use of that workflow.

As more and more individual users start to see the benefits associated
with using Wi-Fi technologies, there will be a resulting groundswell from
the corporate side as well. "Consumer adoption is forcing the enterprise to
come up with a wireless LAN strategy if they haven't already done so," says
Eric Hermelee, VP of marketing for Wavelink, based in Kirkland, Wash.

Consumer adoption of Wi-Fi will not be limited to laptop access,
either. Palm's new portable device, the Tungsten C, has 802.11 capability
built into it. Offering the same processing platform as a Pocket PC device,
this new Palm handheld supports e-mail and Web browsing, as well as Instant
Messenger capabilities. The device also has a voice jack built into it, and
according to Paul Osborne, senior product manager at Palm, voice-over IP
will be supported on the device by this summer.

With the growth of Wi-Fi access points, or hot spots, "we are taking
the very powerful local area network and pushing it outside the boundaries
of campus and home," Osborne says. "People can make good use of their
downtime [off the network] with a powerful, user-friendly device."

Business on Board?

So does all of this mean that we are going to see the mass adoption of
Wi-Fi technology in the next six to 12 months? Or will it take a little
longer for businesses to get on board? According to a recent survey by
PriceWaterhouseCoopers for its "Trendsetter Barometer" of CEOs at more than
400 fast-growth companies in the United States, only 38 percent of
respondents expect to increase their IT budgets in the next 12 months. And
among the areas that were identified by the CEOs as hot areas for IT
investment over the next two to three years, wireless networks were chosen
by 61 percent. Other prime areas included faster data transfer (65 percent),
security application (62 percent) and Web services/XML (49 percent). As far
as the potential impact of the technologies in question, only 38 percent of
the respondents said that wireless LANs would have an important impact on
their own business.

One aspect of the technology that is interesting is its utter
flexibility. It can be deployed in almost any scenario imaginable, and in
some cases, it might even be preferable. Think of deployment at a hospital,
or in an educational environment, where setting up a wired network would be
potentially disruptive and involve a high degree of upkeep and maintenance.
An example of a recent deployment was undertaken by zipper manufacturer YKK.
Working with Wavelink, over the past few months YKK has deployed a wireless
network at locations in six cities across the country, and all of it can be
securely managed from a single location.

While widespread adoption of this technology might not take place
overnight, there are clear indicators that it is time to start thinking
about its use. One need only look at the broad range of service providers
that are looking to get in on the action to see that this is true. A
cross-section of the many players getting involved include:

Cometa, a consortium formed by IBM, AT&T and Intel. Among its projects
is a plan to enable Wi-Fi access at a number of McDonald's in New York.

T-Mobile has deployed access points at well-known retail locations
around the country, including Star-bucks, Borders bookstores and the lounges
of major air carriers American, Delta and United. They will be adding access
at Kinko's locations by the end of this year. There are already more than
2,300 locations available nationwide.

Boingo Wireless and other access providers are deploying hot spots at
a wide range of locations around the country, including hotels, airports,
cafes and convention centers (i.e., the places business travellers are most
likely to be found).

Verizon is planning to set up access points at phone booths in a move
that will give new life to a fixture that often times seems quite antiquated
when put side-by-side against mobile phones. And then there are regional
players, such as Working Wild, who are planning to offer wireless
connectivity at gas stations in the southwest U.S.

There is one important caveat to bear in mind: While your workers
might be able to find access points in many different locations, what they
may not realize is that this could easily result in many different bills
coming into your accounting department at the end of the month. With so many
different access providers trying to cash in on the wireless craze, your
company should be careful to craft a plan that will allow employees to sign
up with an access provider that can best meet their needs, and then get them
to use that same access provider consistently.

It is expected that there will be at least 5,000 hot spots across the
country by year's end, and double that next year, says Christian Gunning,
director of product management at Boingo Wireless in Santa Monica, Calif.
"It will probably be 2004 or 2005 before it really escalates, and is widely
enough available to a significant audience," he says.

Of course, there are those who are even more optimistic. "A year from
now, what you will see is the start of true, publicly available 802.11
connectivity," says Bluesocket's Juitt. "The average person will see
evidence of this in the fact that people will be using their laptops out in
public."

Jason Imber is a freelance writer based in upstate New York.

http://www.destinationffa.com/APCM/templates/mobile_professional_template.asp?Articleid=913&Zoneid=18

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