Value of Mobility


Information has become the engine of our society. It forms the basis of entire industries as in services, media, and advertising. Information provides a competitive advantage to other industries such as financial services, manufacturing, and transportation. Government uses information to preempt and address security threats. The entire educational system is based upon information transfer to pupils. Finally, information is a means of relaxation and entertainment for many of us. Literature, music, television, and movies are in their most abstract form sources of information. As such, information's value and uses are tremendously varied and exceptionally wide in scope.

Over time, businesses and people have come to want and expect accessibility to their source of information where they want it, when they want it, and how they want it. The digital revolution has brought us one step closer to this reality. It not only spawned an entire new industrythe information technology industrybut literally disrupted how society conducts business, functions, and entertains itself. Many of us today are spending our professional lives trying to leverage information and technology to create new value propositions, capture efficiencies and cost savings, and increase productivity.

In his 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory, foresaw that the digital revolution would be a catalyst for a digital flip.[1] Negroponte postulated that content that was traditionally delivered via terrestrial channels would be flipped onto wireless channels. An example is telephony. At the same time, content that was typically delivered via wireless channels would be migrated onto terrestrial carriers. For example, television used to be delivered via radio or satellite. Today, cable-based systems are displacing the wireless distribution medium for television. Hence, there is a flip between delivery mechanisms for content. With many different kinds of digital technologies maturing at breakneck speeds, the opportunity arose to realign the accessibility to information. Indeed, information can be roughly categorized into two types:

  • Information we want access to anywhere and anytime Cellular mobile voice communications is a prime example. Its explosive growth in terms of technologies and consumer adoption rates supports the case of a large demand for anywhere and anytime access to information.

  • Information we consume in fixed locations An example would be television. Most of us do not watch television while on the move. We watch TV at home, in a hotel room, or in a lounge. We do not necessarily require mobility for television because we tend to associate it with relaxation and sitting down.

Note

At the time of writing, various initiatives are underway to provide high-mobility video solutions to consumers. The strategy is to implement video-streaming by means of next-generation cellular technologies or by extending portable music players with video capabilities. It will be interesting to follow the uptake and success of these mobile video solutions.


You could argue that people want to be able to watch television anywhere and anytime. The key word to focus on in this case is anywhere because storage technologies (for example, VCRs, recordable DVDs, and DVRs) have all but made obsolete the notion of anytime. When you consider televisions, the prime parameters that come to mind are screen size, picture quality, and price. Mobility is most likely not on the radar. It simply does not have a high value-proposition in the case of television. This fact supports the low adoption rate of portable televisions. Similarly, the very high adoption rate of mobile phones, although somewhat unexpected, does stand to reason. As such, you can make a valid distinction between applications that demand mobility and those that do not or do so to a very low degree.

In the same way that cellular technologies have extended the Plain Old Telephone Systems (POTS) beyond the boundaries of the wired infrastructure, WLANs extend data communications networks beyond traditional physical boundaries. The implications are vast and complex. Management guru Dr. Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive technology in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen defined a disruptive technology as a new technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology in the market. This occurs despite the fact that the disruptive technology is both radically different from the leading technology and that it often initially performs worse than the leading technology according to existing measures of performance. A disruptive technology thus effectively comes to dominate an existing market either by filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents.

Applying Christensen's definition, wireless networks are truly a disruptive technology. They are fueling growth in companies, capturing efficiencies, boosting productivity, and causing entire industries to rethink their business strategies.[2]

The prime benefit of WLANs is that they enable information to be moved through the ether to the point where it is required. There is no need for hardwiring. There is also no need for line-of-site, a barrier for infrared communication technology. As such, WLANs provide an extendable, totally transparent means for interconnecting entities. These entities can be personal computers (PCs), personal digital assistants (PDAs), phones, sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID) tag transceivers, and many more. In theory, any device that can house a radio transmitter and the appropriate software is a candidate for becoming a WLAN node. Given the traits of transparency and the ability to connect heterogeneous types of devices, it is important to understand the strengths and limitations of WLANs to correctly align business or personal goals and technological solutions.

The next section provides a baseline high-level technical overview of WLANs. We compare WLANs' positioning to other networking technologies and introduce WLAN components, their inner workings, and operational implications. Even though this chapter is comprehensive, it is not exhaustive and does not describe all the technical intricacies of WLAN technology.




The Business Case for Enterprise-Class Wireless Lans
The Business Case for Enterprise-Class Wireless LANs
ISBN: 1587201259
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 163

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