On the topic of the Personal Hotspot, we got to share the thrill that so many others have enjoyed that comes in newly paying more for less of a data plan. To enable the Hotspot feature, we had to commit to $20 more for the feature itself, and also had to downgrade our data plan from unlimited to something far less generous that costs more. Gotta love the promise of a faster network that enables you to run up to limits of your newly smaller data plan, with impressive swiftness. I'm still trying to figure out how this is supposed to make me want to use my mobile broadband over competing services.
Finally, as I kick the tires on various cloud-based wireless solutions, I was floored by how stripped down one of the latest and greatest interfaces is. And I don't mean floored in a good way. As I have more analysis to do, I won't yet name names.
But as more infrastructure offerings move to the cloud, I can't think of too many enterprise features that I have in my current Cisco WLAN that I'd be willing to give up, even if I was keeping up an SME environment instead of a large enterprise. The current cloud control dashboard I'm evaluating is so lacking in everyday WLAN functionality that all I can surmise is that "the cloud must think I'm stupid." (Thankfully, I have seen more robust competitors, so my skepticism here is not a blanket indictment against cloud wireless vendors.)
At the risk of sounding surly, it takes more than shiny devices to make for a quality wireless experience, whether on Wi-Fi or mobile broadband. Here's hoping that "consumerization" doesn't continue to come at the expense of high-performing wireless networks, that sanity eventually settles in for data plan costs, and that there will actually be a feature set waiting for us there if we all end up in the cloud.
