More than half of small- and medium- sized businesses participating in a study on the use of wireless LANs say they will be using a wireless network by August.
Sage Research, a market research group in Natick, Mass., with clients including large technology firms like Cisco Systems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., says the emerging technology is being adopted fairly quickly even though users are still concerned about cost and security.
The group, which surveyed network managers from 150 companies in the United States, defined a wireless LAN as a data communication system used as an extension or an alternative to a wired LAN within a building or campus.
"It's a hot market for equipment vendors," says Jared Huizenga, project manager for Sage Research. "[But] the perception is WLANs are still not as secure as wired LANs, and if you've got transactions floating around in the air, that makes IT managers nervous."
The survey found:
Of those businesses not deploying wireless LANs, 46 percent said the cost is not justifiable; 38 percent said they don't have enough users to justify using WLANs; and 37 percent said WLAN technology is too new.
According to Shelly Tyler, a senior analyst at Phillips InfoTech, a telecommunications research company in Parsipanny, NJ., the market for wireless network has taken off since the technology has become more available in the last two years.
By 2004, the WLAN market in the U.S. will soar to over $1.7 billion from $300 million in 1999, the research company projects.
Most of the big vendors are shipping parts for the WLAN, including networks cards and access points. That is driving the price down of WLAN networks and the presence of the big vendors in the market is convincing more offices to try wireless networks, she says.
Businesses that have employees working in satellite offices or are housed in temporary offices are particularly attracted to wireless networks, Tyler adds.
"If you want a temporary location and you want to share infrastructure without extensive wiring, this is the way to get around it," she says. "This is a way to increase productivity and reduce some costs. A worker doesn't have to have a particular desk. Now you can sit anywhere, move anywhere with your laptop and with no wires attached."
Wireless networks are also attractive to home offices because "in some cases if the office is small enough, you don't even need a LAN, you can just have different computers talking to one another," says Tyler.
Other places that she expects to see the installation of wireless networks are hotels, airports and cafes.
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