Report Predicts 80 Percent Enterprise WLAN Deployment

According to the report by InfoTech, about half of U.S. businesses have deployed WLANs so far. However, those deployments are narrow, reaching only 10 percent of employees within those companies.

New applications will significantly boost both the number of companies deploying WLANs and the number of employees within each company using the technology, the report said.

"This narrow adoption will persist until much-anticipated applications such as voice-over-WLAN have been deployed by market-leading enterprises with a strong return on investment," Scott Drobner, InfoTech's wireless program director said in a statement.

In addition to WLAN deployment, 40 percent of all users will deploy multiple wireless technologies by 2008, Drobner said. That includes cellular service within buildings to augment spotty WLAN coverage.

"The traditional mobile boundaries will continue to blur as wireless business users no longer perceive in-building and out-of-building as separate domains," Drobner said.

This story courtesy of TechWeb.