Twenty Predictions

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It's interesting to hear what other Wi-Fi advocates predict for the technology's future. Here are 20 predications on Wi-Fi's future from some of the industry's most ardent supporters.

Prediction No. 1: The low cost of wireless communications will drive a growing market for embedded machine-to-machine communications in industrial equipment and major appliances for monitoring and problem notification. As illustration, British Gas is placing wireless devices on their bottled gas so the bottles can "phone home" when they are empty.—Sumit Deshpande and Don LeClair, technology strategists, Computer Associates International Inc.

Prediction No. 2: The automobile will become a platform for mobile applications. The vehicle has a big battery, with the ability to generate electricity and the space for all kinds of gadgetry. Furthermore, people are spending more time than ever in their vehicles, so it's not unreasonable to look for in-car telematics to include GPS, data storage, docking for multiple types of handheld devices, hard-copy output, and so on. This already exists in law enforcement—and the new bus-based, 48-volt auto system standards will accelerate the vehicle telematics explosion.—John Parkinson, chief technologist, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young U.S. LLC.

Prediction No. 3: 2003 will see the introduction of the first cellular handset with Wi-Fi capability. This will be the start of a major acceleration in access device penetration. The first devices will be Microsoft Smartphone-based handsets, using SD card-based 802.11 NIC, such as the one soon to be launched by SyChip and SanDisk. Further support will come from Microsoft itself. Within six months integrated Wi-Fi and cellular chipsets will be available for sampling from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and Philips.—Martin North of Sydney, Australia-based digitalplays.com.

Prediction No. 4: Wi-Fi will be invisible to most consumers, but key in the enterprise. Retailers, warehouses, deliverypeople, medical practitioners, fleet managers, venue operators (such as sports arenas and conference centers), hospitality employees, campus-based field forces such as security personnel and facilities staff, and even public safety responders will use Wi-Fi as a primary conduit for data exchange (to/from laptops, PDAs, desktops, handheld scanners, point-of-sales terminals, and kiosks) using mostly private networks but some public networks as well. This will let the service industry's personnel serve staff, customers, and each other with the same benefits of as-needed data exchange and deep data retrieval that their white-collar colleagues have enjoyed for a decade on networked desktop PCs.—Galen Gruman, Editorial Director, IT Wireless, a website that specializes in leveraging wireless technologies for the enterprise.

Prediction No. 5: Wi-Fi will become the #2 prepaid telecom application. A proliferation of Wi-Fi uses will arise quickly, leading to many service providers offering "Prepaid Wi-Fi" services. Travelers, students, and an increasingly mobile population will be able to access these Wi-Fi applications wherever they are, at home, in the office, or on the road—Gene Retskey, a telecommunications author, motivational speaker, professor, and Editor-In-Chief of The Prepaid Press, the leading trade publication on prepaid telecommunications.

Prediction No. 6: Wi-Fi's potential as a last mile solution has generally being overlooked. WLAN technologies will become very widespread in the distribution of broadband access from DSL/cable nodes to local communities. It is relatively cheap to purchase/install, global standards are in place, equipment is widely available, there are no licenses to purchase, and there is a nice fat pipe to the Internet to offer.—Tony Crab-tree of Hampshire, England-based Juniper Research,

Prediction No. 7: Within the next five years, more nonvocal transactions will traverse the airwaves, causing a trend for mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs to become the holder of our identities within the next five years. Much like the role of a driver's license, our mobile communications device will serve to authenticate us and securely contain credentials and certificates. Biometrics, embedded appropriately, would thwart identity theft.—Peter Athanas, associate professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Prediction No. 8: By as early as 2004, more than one million remote and mobile devices will be integrated with enterprise applications. Early adopters will include the industrial, oil and gas, manufacturing, and utilities industries. Typical applications will include homeland defense sensors, the monitoring of flow and pressure of petroleum production, meter reading, and field communications.—Bob Ross, WebSphere integration program director, IBM Software Group.

Prediction No. 9: By 2004 there will be more than 50,000 publicly accessible HotSpots around the world. Established wireline carriers will create the vast majority of the HotSpots, although packet wireless carriers and cheap "Wi-Fi-in-a-box" products also will be responsible for creating some of these public access points. Aggregators will be the glue that binds together all these Wi-Fi "islands." Also by 2004, different network variants will begin to merge into a seamless, "wireless broadband" global network for roaming purposes. The public doesn't care what acronym or standard is used; they'll just want "wireless broadband."—John Rasmus, vice president, GRIC Communications Inc.

Prediction No. 10: By 2004, CRM vendors will need to help companies manage customer interactions via wireless devices. CRM vendors that don't offer that functionality—such as the ability for retailers to push information like coupons to their customers' wireless devices—will find themselves left on the dock as the ship sails off without them.—Bud Michael, executive vice president, Kana Inc.

Prediction No. 11: If quality of service, roaming, and security issues can be worked out—and all of these straightforward technically—there is a killer app for companies to run "wireless PBXs." In other words, route their voice traffic within the company over the private Wi-Fi network. This would save mucho costs, and give the companies features and management capabilities they don't have today. We're probably talking two to four years for even early adopters to go this way, but the numbers could get very big very fast.—Kevin Werbach, an independent technology analyst, author, and founder of werbach.com.

Prediction No. 12: Wi-Fi will be everywhere by 2007; it will be delivered either by new installations or via the conversion of old pay telephone sites into Wi-Fi access points. However, although sending voice and data over Wi-Fi will become popular, making money off of such installations will face similar if not greater challenges as that other grassroots phenomenon, the Internet. Popularity alone does not guarantee the success of a business model. Even so, we can be certain that some sort of personal communications device that allows one to roam from cellular to Wi-Fi networks will appear. Indeed, much of the communications technology of the future will be wireless in nature.—Richard "Zippy" Grigonis, editor-in-chief of VON (Voice on the Net) magazine, www.vonmag.com.

Prediction No. 13: By 2008 there will be 100 million Wi-Fi devices seeking 10 million wireless broadband customers. The result will be a wide variety of businesses, from incumbent wireline and cellular service providers to truck stops and delis, profiting from wireless Internet traffic.—Dr. Larry Brilliant, vice chairman of Cometa Networks

Prediction No. 14: Within the next five years, all front-end user computing interfaces will be wireless.—Sumit Deshpande and Don LeClair, technology strategists, Computer Associates International Inc.

Prediction No. 15: In the next five years, wireless access will revitalize a lot of back-end applications that have had limited success in past years, e.g. sales force automation.—Dale Gonzalez, vice president of wireless engineering, Air2Web Inc.

Prediction No. 16: Within five years, wireless PDAs will become the most popular handheld device sold, combining cell phone voice plus Internet access and email in a single device.—J. Gerry Purdy, principal analyst, MobileTrax LLC.

Prediction No. 17: By 2007, PDAs and cell phones will have merged into single devices. These diminutive devices will have 802.11 (whatever flavor), Bluetooth, 3G, and, possibly, direct satellite capability. They'll be voice-controlled and use a heads-up holographic display. Laptops will become unnecessary for most folks.—Doug Jackson, director of technology customer services, University of Texas at Dallas.

Prediction No. 18: By 2013, your kids will point to an Ethernet cable and say, "Mommy, what's that."—Paul Gillin, editor, SearchDatabase.com.

Prediction No. 19: By the year 2020, it will be common for healthcaregivers to use mobile computing. Implanted wireless devices will monitor people's health continuously, allowing the medical profession to recognize and treat most diseases in their infancy. Mobile computing also will be used to monitor the population's diet, control unhealthy habits such as smoking and alcohol consumption, and enable people to maximize the effects of exercise. For instance, diseases such as diabetes will be virtually controlled through wireless monitoring and corrective-action devices that will automatically adjust insulin levels, without the patient even knowing.—Phil Asmundson, deputy managing director of the Technology, Media & Telecommunications Group, Deloitte & Touche LLP.

Prediction No. 20: Today's web services are about machine-to-machine communications, integrating different computing systems together using open standards. But we shouldn't forget the thousands of other devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and pagers that need to talk and coordinate with each other. By 2006, web services on small devices will become increasingly important for giving the sales force and other workers access to corporate information behind the firewall. These devices will also begin to see usage in automotive and healthcare applications.—Bob Sutor, director of Web services strategy, IBM Software Group.

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