The manufacturing, health and education sectors are leading
the way in the take-up of enterprise wireless Lans, according to
research from market analyst firm Datamonitor. The firm also found
the financial and professional services sectors were buying
wireless services.
Datamonitor said it believed that technical obstacles to the
widespread adoption of WLan in business have now been overcome.
Globally, early adopt-ers of WLans have been the retail and
manufacturing sectors, but Datamonitor found that education and
healthcare organisations were now making significant investments in
wireless technology.
Manufacturers spent £30m in 2003 on WLan technology, but are
expected to spend £44m annually by 2006. Annual WLan spending in
education is set to increase from £15m today to £35m in 2006. Over
the same period, retail is due to grow from £14m to £23m, and
healthcare from £9m to £15m. It also found there was strong take-up
of WLans in the financial and professional services sectors.
Until recently, WLan adoption was hampered by concerns over poor
security, confusion over standards and a lack of devices being
bundled with integrated wireless connectivity.
Security concerns have been eased with the introduction of the
Wi-Fi Protected Access standard, which provides more protection
than the existing Wired Equivalent Privacy protocol.
The choice of connectivity standards has also become more focused
with the launch of 802.11g, which combines the best features of the
popular 802.11b standard with the competing 802.11a
specification.
Previously, users who wanted to connect to a WLan were limited to
one of two incompatible standards: 802.11b for access up to 11mbps
and 802.11a for 54mbps access. The slower 802.11b standard is
widely deployed, but 802.11a is unlikely to be a big hit in
Europe.
Datamonitor analyst Tim Gower said, "802.11a will not gain
significant traction in Europe in comparison to the US, primarily
because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b."
Gower said the 802.11g standard would prove more popular in Europe,
as it offered 54mbps access and was compatible with 802.11b. He
added that the launch of Intel's Centrino integrated-WLan system in
laptops has also made connecting to a WLan much easier.
Gartner analysts said businesses should adopt WLan now, to avoid
staff implementing insecure systems themselves.