Wireless The Beauty of Ubiquity

As new applications and devices proliferate, Wi-Fi will become a necessity
for many people, creating a grassroot-level demand for Wi-Fi connectivity in
public business places like hotels, airports, and other meeting places,
considering a large section of the population works while in transit.
Accessibility of public hotspots, reduction of bandwidth costs and availability
of Wi-Fi-enabled notebooks will be the growth drivers in the wireless market.
There are already several devices in the market which are Wi-Fi compatible, like
handhelds, PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, all-in-ones, MP3 players,
video-on-demand. Utilization of these products by the younger generation will
certainly assure demand in the next wave of connectivity.

WiMaxing Out

WiMAX, the next big revolution in the wireless space, is a welcome addition for
a country like India, where broadband penetration is low; it will definitely
increase broadband connectivity rates. WiMAX can be used independently or can
complement Wi-Fi, to provide last-mile connectivity. It will provide additional
services and, simultaneously, increase Wi-Fi usage and vice versa, spurring
greater acceptance of wireless connectivity. According to IDC, by the end of
2005, there will be as many as 118,000 public "hotspots" worldwide.

In
enterprises, the rate of adoption is increasing exceptionally, and this can be
largely attributed to companies providing notebooks to their employees.
Employees can travel and stay connected to their network or download information
from the Internet. In order to expand into a wireless network, enterprises have
to only invest in access points, as they already have the LAN network in place.

The primary challenge for CIOs for internal use is the issue of security. The
security issue has, to a large extent, been addressed by the latest IEEE
security recommendations like WPA, 802.1x and TKIP. However, there are several
private players in the market who cater to this segment like Blue Socket, Vivato.
Even the Access Points (APs) from vendors like Airespace and Proxim offer
extremely high scalable and configurable levels of security for private
networks. These allow most of the security issues to be taken care of while
deploying Wi-Fi for internal and external usage. The tremendous growth in the
wireless space is an indicator that in the next couple of years, wireless
technology and products in India will be viewed more as a commodity, and a
necessity, rather than of mere gizmo value.

Paramjit Singh Puri, head, APAC and India, Pronto Networks