Today’s Enterprise Wireless LAN Expectations

Today’s CIO must make the most of every dollar invested. Wireless LAN’s are no exception. It may have been easy a few years ago to justify a few access points in a handful of conference rooms for email, web browsing, and guest access, but a major investment today to broaden the deployment must show real ROI, not just promises for greater employee productivity.

To get a real return today, it’s all about the applications. There is no shortage of mobile applications and devices with the capability to transform the way a company serves its customers, or a hospital cares for its patients or a school teaches its students. A nurse can advise a doctor on a patient’s condition from a wireless VoIP phone and a teacher with a mobile computer lab has the ability to open up new worlds for children when they go online. A worker may be reached via a single phone number on a dual-mode handset whether he is walking the corridors of the office where the voice minutes are free, or servicing a customer in the field using the cellular network.. The whereabouts of expensive mobile assets like infusion pumps in a hospital may be tracked using location technology to increase their utilization and reduce costly write offs. By Metcalfe’s law the value of the wireless LAN increases exponentially as more and more users access these applications when they are mobile.

But without assured application delivery of these mobile applications, these benefits may never be fully realized. The reality of what conventional wireless LAN solutions can do is quite sobering. Children spend 10% of every computer lab trying to connect, rather than learning. Hospitals mark the floors with tape at the points where their wireless VoIP phones are known to drop calls. The only way to guarantee payback is to invest in a state-of-the-art wireless infrastructure that assures application delivery, regardless of the number of users or applications that are running over the network.

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Assured mobile application delivery requires a network infrastructure built on the following principles:

• High scalability
• Predictable performance and reliability
• Iron-clad security
• Ease of deployment and operations
• Solution assurance