Everything Old is New Again

Motorola dusts off the all wireless office concept and repackages it for the Enterprise.

With ambitions to become the wireless gold standard for Enterprise networking Light Reading reports that the company plans to leverage the 802.11n standard to stake a high-profile place amongst wireless LAN purveyors. Motorola isn't promoting a wholesale switcheroo to wireless with customers ripping out cabling willy-nilly. Rather it feels that using 802.11n extensions to existing networks make sense as do for the construction of new networks.

Motorola sees lots of benefit to this technology for the wiring closet. But it also believes cost savings is a major key. To this end, Motorola cited a Greenfield deployment where maintenance spending for wireless was projected at $12.51 per user per year versus $88 for wired. And too, wireless networks might require fewer pieces of expensive gear to implement in general. 

Other areas for savings will likely be in using wireless phone systems and in distribution router layers. Motorola feels it finally has the technology in 802.11n to implement a wireless network with sufficient speed and capacity to realize a vision of true Enterprise wireless LANs.

So where does WiMAX fit in this equation? Well, certainly these networks could be fed by WiMAX connections on the outside. One of the real beauties of wireless in general is that technologies can be changed shifted to with one Ethernet connection appliance between them. After all, we are talking all IP systems here. The same applies eventually for LTE. I can't help myself wondering if the real revolution here isn't so much wireless technology as it is the committed shift to all-IP architectures for data and voice and video that we are all experiencing. Major carriers themselves are shifting to IP systems as fast as they can. The cost savings alone justify it. But the ability to field new revenue generating services is huge as well.

Tim Sanders,

TheFinalMile