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F E A T U R E

MOBILE & WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY

The Survivor's Guide to 2002

December 17, 2001
By Dave Molta

Online Only: The Year That Was


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Wireless networking is a lot like rocket science. Both are sexy. Both depend on the magic of physics. Both have the profound potential to change the world in which we live. If pressed to identify the key difference, we'd probably say that rocket science is a little easier to get right.

Wireless networking, though cool, is risky. Give an engineer a piece of copper cabling or glass fiber, and he can measure its characteristics with incredible precision, enabling the design of communications circuitry that yields highly predictable results. Give that engineer the electromagnetic spectrum that surrounds us, and he encounters variables with interactions that are often far from predictable. Yet we try to overcome the complexity for a worthy cause: mobility. Mobile access to information means you can elevate the quality of decision making, improve the efficiency of business processes, and enhance relationships with your customers.

Network Computing's coverage of mobile and wireless technologies encompasses these six key segments of the market:

WPANs (wireless personal-area networks)
WLANs (wireless local-area networks)
WWANs (wireless wide-area networks)
Fixed-access wireless networks
Mobile devices
Mobile applications

Admittedly, we could have sliced it differently, combining categories that overlap and breaking down others into discrete segments. But on the whole, we feel this categorization fits today's market pretty well. Someday we may take infrastructure for granted, much as we do Ethernet today, and we'll focus more intensely on applications. But for now, infrastructure and applications are inextricably intertwined.