FREEWIRE

Patience Paves Path To Portable Prosperity

Truth be told, exponential growth has not yet arrived. Best estimate of the installed base of wireless LANs, including the majority of the transceivers that are in industrial handheld devices, is perhaps 600,000 to 750,000, depending on whose numbers you believe. Several vendors have bitten the dust and others seem to be lost in the corporate shuffle. Venerable Motorola walked away from the market altogether, reportedly writing off some $70 million to $80 million in cumulative investments, which sounds like a lot until you realize that it's pocket change compared to the billions being poured into bleeding-edge wireless projects like Iridium. High-flyer Xircom sold its troubled wireless LAN division to a managemen t group that is valiantly attempting to fulfill earlier expectations. The wireless LAN pioneers at NCR-cum-AT&T-cum-Lucent are plugging away in the corporate market, happy to have survived the spin-off as a tiny nit on the Lucent behemoth. IBM got lost in cyberspace.

As gloomy as this appears, a more careful look at those companies that did get strategies and technologies right reveals a much brighter picture. The latest products being delivered offer substantial improvements over earlier generations in cost, performance and form factor. Extraordinary efforts are being made to ensure multivendor interoperability now that the long, drawn-out IEEE 802.11 standards process is nearing completion. Wireless LAN management software is getting a lot more comprehensive, delivering complete network solutions rather than just raw wireless links. And finally, an accelerating pace of OEM design wins by the two powerhouse transceiver suppliers, Aironet and Proxim, indicate a broad acceptance of the technology among portable terminal manufacturers both in the United States and internationally.

Am I ready to predict that 1997 will be the year of the wireless LAN? Hey, Lucy, hold that football s teady. This time for sure!

Aironet Arrives One hearty survivor that seems to be poised for growth is Aironet, successor to Telesystems SLW, the very first company to get FCC certification for an unlicensed spread spectrum transceiver way back in 1988. Aironet used a two-pronged approach to carry it through the lean years--wireless LAN bridges and OEM transceiver sales--which is how it came to be owned by Telxon, a major handheld terminal manufacturer. Claiming approximately a third of the market, Aironet's bread and butter is still 900-MHz direct-sequence radios. These offer 1-Mbps data rates and indoor ranges up to 450 feet, providing over 600,000 square feet of coverage from a single access point, or outdoor ranges up to 25 miles (line of sight, provided you burn incense to the radio gods) in point-to-point bridge applic ations using high-gain directional antennas.

Keeping pace with ongoing technology advances, Aironet is working hard to make sure the shift to the 2.4-GHz band doesn't leave i t behind. In fact, 2.4 GHz is rapidly becoming the preferred frequency for unlicensed wireless LANs because of its worldwide allocation and ability to support higher data rates. An agnostic in the modulation-scheme religious wars, Aironet developed both direct-sequence and frequency-hop radios with speeds up to 2 Mbps. Aironet carefully focused on industrial vertical markets such as retail inventory management and warehouse materials handling systems--Telxon's home court. Although these may not sound sexy, the network integration and management challenges found in these environments can be even more severe than those typically found in offices. This has forced Aironet to invest in sophisticated network management software, a strategy that is starting to pay off as major customers including Ford Motor and American Airlines begin multilocation worldwide deployments.

Proxim Pursues Rapidly closing in on Aironet's lead is Proxim, another OEM old-timer that cut its teeth on first generation 900-MHz tra nsceivers. Proxim has taken the lead on the 2.4-GHz front, claiming a 70 percent share of unit shipments at that frequency. Its slick, new, 2.4-GHz one-piece PC card adapter, the RangeLAN2 7400, is a big step up from earlier soap-on-a-rope two-piece designs. Boasting a 1.6-Mbps data rate and tipping the scales at a featherweight 1.09 ounces, the 7400 is an excellent selection for portable applications where weight and power consumption considerations dominate. The associated RangeLAN2 access points are based on a RISC processor design that incorporates advanced filtering and forwarding capabilities, operating at the full 10-Mbps Ethernet backbone, as well as SNMP management software that includes remote management via telnet or modem. Considering the inhospitable places some of these access points get located (the operating temperature ra nge is -20¡ C to +60¡ C and the shock and vibration specs would rattle your brains), one-time installation and remote management can save a lot of wear and tear on harried s ystem administrators.