802.11n rush

register.co.uk |Enterprises throw caution to the wind in 802.11n rush| Standards bodies far behind the WLAN adoption curve.By Faultline 13th September 2008 17:48 GMT

The wireless industry changes at the speed of light and so do the attitudes of its customers. Five years ago, amid the intense nervousness of enterprises about adopting pre-standard fast Wi-Fi standards or insecure - Wi-Fi at all - who would have predicted the carefree abandonment with which corporates are now embracing pre-standard 802.11n?

Yet survey after survey indicates that the corporate world is adopting the 100Mbps-plus wireless technology, once assumed to appeal mainly to consumers in the home media networks market, eagerly and casting aside the usual conservatism about systems that are not yet fully standardized.

This in turn indicates how irrelevant traditional standards making processes are becoming, in a world where the need to gain even a slight edge in price/performance, and therefore efficiency and competitive edge, trump the old worries about technology dead ends and long term investment risks. In the enterprise, as in the home, technology is becoming cheap, disposable and something that must be installed today, before the moment is lost. (...)