Is Wi-Fi the Future of Wireless?
Wi-Fi seems to be taking the same path as Ethernet: starting out slow and expensive, and undergoing continuous enhancements that make it faster and cheaper. Along its path to commoditization, Wi-Fi is penetrating new markets. Originally a niche technology, useful only in certain vertical industries, it has achieved ubiquity on home networks, much to the chagrin of moonlighting cable technicians. Predictably, the mass consumer appeal of Wi-Fi drove down prices for wireless routers and notebooks with embedded Wi-Fi.
The next phase is the mass adoption of Wi-Fi in the enterprise, followed by metro-area Wi-Fi--if you believe those who preach about wireless mesh, bridging the digital divide, and sticking it to entrenched telecom and Big Cable. Herein lies the problem. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi is a poor metro-area wireless technology. It's designed to be a small-cell, contention-based LAN system and, even with myriad enhancements, it's hard to believe you'd create anything like what we have today if you had the luxury of starting with a clean slate.
Charting Wi-Fi's evolution to follow the same course as Ethernet's is probably a mistake; after all, Ethernet has evolved into a high-speed, point-to-point packet-framing and -signaling standard beholden to none of the physical layer media-contention issues of the past. Wi-Fi is different. That IBM salesman may have been wrong about Ethernet, but combine the laws of physics, a LAN MAC and unlicensed radio with large-scale metro Wi-Fi deployments and the result isn't pretty. In fact, it's so ugly that I'm betting a large proportion of current metro Wi-Fi projects will collapse under the weight of the 802.11 legacy.
Yet because Wi-Fi has become a commodity technology, it's driving metro wireless. Arguments that 3G or mobile WiMax are superior technologies fall on deaf ears. All that's left to do is find a way to make Wi-Fi work. Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic.
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