A Wireless World?

Every year, there is some technology or the other that is seen as the great hope of the future. There was WAP last year. Then there was push technology and many, many others like that.

As we step into 2002, there are at least two contenders for the honor: wireless networking and biometrics. Both of these have been around for some time now, as concepts and even as not-so-successful products.

Biometrics caught public fancy (read American public) after the September attacks on the World Trade Center. It has many hitherto unfamiliar names and a large component of non-computing application areas, ranging from ATM access to airport security, pushing it forward. Wireless networking, on the other hand, has had a slightly more sedate ride to the top.

The wireless-networking world is populated by more familiar names like Cisco, 3Com and Microsoft. And like many other tech trends, this one, too, was more or less set off by Apple, quite some time back with its Airport networking for
iBooks.

Wireless networking is not to be confused with wireless peripherals, like keyboards and mice. Wireless networking is about connecting multiple computers on to a network without using networking cables.

On the face of it, wireless networking offers many wonderful freedoms. No more the messy tangle of wires; you can move around with your workstation, particularly notebooks, more freely, and that too without worrying about line of sight issues; organizations can set up or extend their networks more easily, and so on.

But the flip side is an equally big list. There are issues of bandwidth, of range, of licenses, and more important, of cost. Of all these, the technology issues are perhaps the least worrisome, and can be sorted out soon. It is the cost front that offers much worry. Consider this. Cisco’s Aironet AccessPoint costs more than a lakh of rupees for a set of two PCMCIA cards and an access point. In this country at least, ‘wire-full’ networks come far, far cheaper.

Unless the cost issue is handled, there are serious doubts on the future of this promising technology. But then in typical catch-22 fashion, vendors point out that prices cannot improve till volumes pick up! So, for serious users, it is still wait-and-watch for the technologies to mature and for the pricing to come down to acceptable levels.

Unfortunately, technologies that are hailed as the next big thing have the annoying habit of failing to live up to expectations and, instead, ending up as soon to be forgotten flops. Will wireless networking also follow this trend? We will know by this time, next year.