Wireless

The need for wireless policy has never been greater. 802.11/a/b/g wireless networks (WLANs) [1] have taken the Information Technology world by storm. With 35 million units expected to sell in 2003 and with a predicted growth rate of 50-200% compounded year over year through 2006, wireless is here to stay. The benefits of wireless connectivity in the business world are immense; they come in the form of flexibility, convenience, portability, increased productivity, relatively low cost, and ease of implementation. These benefits are not without an expense, though.

The wireless development landscape differs from the wired world in a number of ways. For one thing, the dominance of handheld device manufacturers and proprietary OS makers has meant that open source projects for wireless connectivity have been slow to take off. But now this sector is showing some signs of life. In this article, Anne Zieger explains both the delays and the brightening future.

Startup AirFlow Networks Inc. will introduce a WLAN platform with features designed to ease configuration and set the technology apart from a burgeoning list of similar offerings, officials said. Like its competitors, AirFlow's platform centralizes management into the switch, but it also solves interference problems without the need for site surveys, officials said.

RFID (radio frequency identification), the technology behind wireless sensors used for tagging products to track their location, is getting attention across a number of industries, including manufacturing, retailing, transportation, and logistics. Giants like Wal-Mart, Target, and General Motors are already incorporating it into their supply-chain operations. Although all those RFID tags are barely out the door, RFID vendors are now adding a business intelligence layer to the location-based stack to help a company measure and improve its operations.

Delta Air Lines and carrier T-Mobile USA announced Monday that broadband Internet access will soon be available through T-Mobile Wi-Fi hot spots in several airports through the Delta Crown Room Club business lounge program.

Gateway Inc. unveiled several new products to allow PC users to connect to wireless networks Thursday, as part of its year-long rollout of new products. The new wireless routers, USB (universal serial bus) adapters, and PC cards use the 802.11g and 802.11b standards for wireless networking. The 802.11g standard enables wireless connections as fast as 54M bps (bits per second), although in most cases users will experience connection speeds of around 20M bps. The 802.11b standard allows connections as fast as 11 bps, but is also somewhat slower in most cases.

IP Wireless, a manufacturer of wireless wide area network modems, announced this week a partnership with Possio, a Swedish maker of access points, to incorporate IP Wireless PCMCIA WAN cards inside the access point (AP). Where wired connections such as DSL and cable are not available, the IP wireless cards become the backhaul for the Wi-Fi network.

There you are: sitting in your favorite bookstore/café, sipping a caramel latte and casually leafing through the latest copy of Wired magazine when you are suddenly bombarded from almost every direction without warning and with no means to stop it. Fortunately, the storm you are caught in is made up of 802.11 packets which are traveling in the 2.4 or 5 gigahertz range and pose no real physical danger to you or those around you.

Hitachi Ltd. has developed an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip that requires no external antenna and makes possible the embedding of tracking and identification chips in bank notes, tickets and other paper products. At present Hitachi's Myu chip, and many competing chips from other companies, require antennas through which data is received and transmitted to a chip reader and also power is drawn. In the case of the current generation Myu chip this antenna can be between five centimeters and seven centimeters long, said Keisaku Shibatani, a spokesman for Hitachi.

Will Wi-Fi prove to be a key technology integrated into future cellphones? Panellists speaking yesterday at the annual Telecosm conference in Squaw Valley, California believe so.

"I believe Wi-Fi will become a standard component of cellphones in the future," said Sky Dayton, CEO of Wi-Fi network provider Boingo Wireless, according to a Comms Design report.