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July 19, 1999

Wireless LANs Set To Take Off

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The wireless LAN solved another, somewhat unusual, problem for Cremean. His company is housed in a building that has asbestos ceilings. "With every move, add, and change, we need to call in an engineer. Here, it costs $1,000 every time you have to lift a ceiling tile."

The savings can be dramatic, even without asbestos ceiling tiles. Gartner Group estimates the typical move, addition, or change on a wired network costs $300 to $600.

Speed is another issue that customers must consider when assessing wireless LANs. University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina completed the initial stages with its implementation of RangeLAN, a wireless LAN product from Proxim Inc., but ended up putting the project on hold. "The response time was not where we wanted it to be," says Bruce Hedreen, network systems analyst at the Greenville, N.C., hospital.

The hospital decided to implement a wireless network to let doctors and nurses perform bedside charting. Many rooms did not have the space to accommodate full-size workstations on carts, which would have been the alternative. The hospital chose RangeLAN because it offered management capabilities over the Web, among other things. But Hedreen did not know that the Proxim product--just like every other wireless LAN product available at the time--would not support the client-server medical records application the hospital staff needed to access.

"A 3270 connection works great, but that's completely different communications compared with our medical-records application," Hedreen says. "We didn't realize we wouldn't get the bandwidth we needed, so we've put things on hold for now."

Getting Up To Speed
Slow speed is a common complaint--and one of the main reasons customers have not adopted wireless technology more quickly. An ordinary wired Fast Ethernet connection can give users as much as 100 Mbps of bandwidth. However, until recently, 2 Mbps was the fastest speed wireless LAN vendors promised. "Even best-of-breed wireless LANs will go between 10 and 50 times slower than 100Base-T Ethernet," Gartner Group's Egan says. "That's the difference between a one-second startup and a two-minute startup."

Even with faster products on the way, IT managers need to be aware that actual throughput rates can be much slower than the rates at which the products operate. Hedreen learned that lesson the hard way: "After a while, we quit believing what bandwidth the companies claimed they offered. You really have to do all the testing yourself."

There is even a difference in the types of wireless technologies and the throughput rates each of those types can offer (see story, left).

Speeds, however, are starting to pick up. Proxim today offers a 2-Mbps RangeLAN product, and it's planning to release a 24-Mbps product dubbed RangeLAN5 early next year. Aironet Wireless Communications Inc. today sells an Aironet 4800 Series of 11-Mbps wireless LAN products but also plans to release in the next year a faster version that runs at 22 Mbps. RadioLAN Inc. already offers RadioLAN/10, which claims throughput of 10 Mbps, although the product doesn't adhere to the latest wireless LAN standards. And Lucent Technologies sells WaveLAN/IEEE running at 2 Mbps, yet analysts say the company will release a faster product soon. There are a handful of other wireless LAN products available from various companies--including BreezeCom and Symbol Technologies--that are quickly coming up to speed.