FREEWIRE

Patience Paves Path To Portable Prosperity

Dueling Do-Gooders As the surviving vendors begin smelling success, jockeying for position has become more intense. This year saw the formation of not one but two industry associations dedicated to the promotion of wireless LANs. The first, the Wireless LAN Alliance (WLANA, at www.wlana.com), is a scrupulously v endor-independent organization dedicated to education and the promotion of wireless LAN technologies. Including manufacturers that comprise some 95 percent of industry revenues, WLA NA refuses to take sides on any contentious issues, which makes it no fun at all to argue with.

A more partisan group called the Wireless LAN Interoperability Forum (WLIF) was founded by Proxim and its army of OEM customers, though it now includes several rival transceiver manufacturers. WLIF is focused on solving the multivendor interoperability problem--a problem that transcends the IEEE 802.11 standard, which specifies only physical (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers. Mixing and matching access points and adapters from different vendors, particularly across a wired LAN backbone, remains a harrowing experience. Unwilling to wait for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to take up the problem, Proxim is promoting its own technology, offering to license it to all comers. Ad hoc groups are also springing up to create interoperability clusters, such as the effort by AMD, BreezeCom, Pulse, Raytheon and NetWave, the former Xircom group.

An open question is: How soon will the leading vendors migrate to full IEEE 802.11 compliance? Although the technical work is done, formal approval by the IEEE chain of command won't be complete until the middle of next year. As you might expect, vendors with aging product lines that are gearing up for their next product cycle are more eager to push 802.11 compliance than vendors that have just completed a development cycle and would like to make a few bucks before they have to go back and change things. In time, this should sort itself out as only a few rabid renegades have rejected 802.11 altogether.

And what about the much maligned mobile professionals--those office workers who are supposed to crave continuous LAN connectivity as they schlep their laptops around the corporate campus? These represent less than 3 percent of the wireless LAN market today. The Giga Info rmation Group forecasts this segment to grow to about a quarter of the market by the year 2000 as the total wireless LAN installed base reaches some four million units. Maybe so , but pulling this off is going to require a significant drop in adapter prices, still hovering above the $500 mark. This could conceivably happen as silicon vendors begin taking full advantage of the IEEE 802.11 standard, but I wouldn't hold my breath. For the time being, it looks like mission-critical mobile applications will dominate. Even so, we can look forward to celebrating the one million unit mark in 1997. Like comedian Rodney Dangerfield, perhaps wireless LAN vendors need no longer lament that they "don't get no respect."

Bill Frezza is the President of Wireless Computing Associates. He can be reached via e-mail at frezza@interramp.com or on the Web at techweb.cmp.com/nc/frezza/frezza.html.