There's plenty of room for innovation in the WLAN NIC market, and prices should continue to drop. The multiband/multimode trend will likely broaden in the coming year with NICs introduced that support 802.11 WLAN standards as well as wide area cellular standards like GPRS and 1xRTT, with transparent roaming between the two.
If there's a breakthrough that's needed, it's in the area of power efficiency. Today's products simply don't meet user expectations. For WLAN functionality to be extended beyond the notebook computer to smaller, battery-constrained devices, such as PDAs and cell phones, improvements in power management will be required.
Dave Molta is a senior technology editor of Network Computing. Write to him at [email protected].
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