Building a Wi-Fi hot spot, for example, can cost as little as £500 (although it's not unusual for a business to spend around £10,000 on a company-wide, secure wireless LAN). "Given the cost involved, does it really matter if the standard you buy today isn't around in three years?" says Ken Dulaney, of analyst firm Gartner Group. "The gains in productivity over 12 months more than outweigh the investment you'll make in the technology."
Businesses can also take comfort from the fact that transforming today's wireless technologies into a seamless, converged wireless communications infrastructure won't happen overnight. "Changing telecoms is like changing your bank account," says Paul Meakin, portfolio business development manager at networking supplier Damovo. "There's an in-built conservatism about the hassle, and the hype is often undermined by the reality."
In-built conservatism
But getting the best from any wireless access technology depends on choosing the appropriate product and deploying it in the right place. Although Wi-Fi might seem the most obvious choice because of its prevalence, there are alternatives. Here, ZDNet UK provides a rundown of some of the current -- and future -- frontrunners in wireless access:
FSO: Free Space Optics (FSO) has been around for almost 20 years and has been used for many years to send information from the pit to car technicians during Formula One races. Where radio sends information as radio waves across the megahertz (MHz) spectrum, FSO sends information as light across the terahertz (THz) spectrum.
The main advantage of FSO is that it costs a tenth of equivalent wired access --- around $20,000 for a typical large enterprise customer. It's also extremely fast, offering speeds of up to 1.2Gbps with promises of up to 2.4Gbps to come. Because the THz spectrum is unlicensed, carriers can get systems up and running extremely quickly. For this reason, FSO has been most popular in cases where buildings are close together but can't be physically linked -- for example, college campuses where buildings are separated by a river or main road.
However, FSO technology has some limitations because it is a line-of-sight technology. The transmitter and the carrier's receiver need to have an uninterrupted view of one another. If there is fog then fine water particles can disrupt FSO laser beams and shorten their reach. If there is high wind, buildings can sway and knock lasers out of alignment. Even birds flying close to laser transmitters can disrupt the signal.
