Wireless LAN

There is an adage one frequently hears in our industry: “when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object.” It usually symbolizes an inflection point in a marketplace where a technical or market shift transforms the landscape for a generation of technology, and, correspondingly, for how people conduct their lives and businesses. The unstoppable force that we are referring to today is the Wireless LAN (WLAN) or Wi-Fi revolution that is rapidly transforming the networking technology landscape. The first wireless revolution was radio (and later television), and it transformed entertainment for hundreds of millions of people. The second wireless revolution, the cellular telephone, fundamentally altered the marketplace for voice communications.

We are in the middle of the “WiFi moment,” an inflection point when the enterprise networking market is changing, adapting to the enormous productivity benefits presented by WLANs. Many of us have used WLANs at home to extend broadband connections. For business users, everyone who has experienced WLAN technology understands that the productivity is in the connectivity: more customer service transactions processed, more orders fulfilled, more emails sent, more patient records accessed, etc. 802.11 has won the near-term wireless technology war, not 3G cellular or its derivatives. No inflection point occurs without resistance.

Of the dozens of enterprise IT teams we have worked with over the past years, every single one had some form of limited WLAN deployment or is planning to move in that direction over the next year (only the select few had a full-scale WLAN deployment). Without exception, however, each organization was concerned about one of three major challenges:

Large-scale design and deployment:
• Operations concerns related to the difficulty and expense of enterprise-wise design, deployment and on-going maintenance
Enterprise-hardened security to secure business-critical data
Seamless mobility concerns: the ability of their WLAN networks to support -- for real-time application such as voice as well as integration with their wired networks

Integral Wireless Solutions is the company to help guide corporate enterprises, government institutions, including healthcare and education, through the WLAN deployment process.