Wireless in 2005, Take 2

WiMAX: WiMAX will make the transition from promise to reality during2005 with two parallel developments. First, a number of companies willrelease WiMAX chipsets that will then be incorporated into commercialproducts. Although Intel is expected to be the dominant provider ofWiMAX silicon, competition is critical to ongoing innovation.Competitive dynamics in the Wi-Fi chip market played a key role indriving up technical improvements and driving down prices. Let's hopesimilar market dynamics take place with WiMAX. The second majordevelopment relates to certification provided by the WiMAX Forum. Likeany new network technology, product interoperability is key to adoption,and the WiMAX certification will help advance that goal. It's importantto note that in 2005 most WiMAX products will be used to develop fixedwireless services by enterprises and service providers. Portable andmobile WiMAX won't happen in 2005.

Mesh Networking: Wireless mesh technology has great long-term potentialfor enabling the delivery of network services to locations wherephysical backhaul cabling is not practical. Mesh is one of the keyenablers for metro Wi-Fi deployments, which are being touted across thecountry. Today's wireless mesh market is still fairly immature, and theperformance trade-offs required to use wireless backhaul are oftensignificant, particularly because a node is more than three mesh hopsfrom a wired connection. We can expect to see some improvement in meshefficiency during 2005, and the availability of more spectrum in the5-GHz band will also help overcome some current performance problems.But until standards for this technology emerge, you can expect prices tostay fairly high and interoperability to be non-existent. While the IEEEhas begun work on a mesh standard, don't expect anything solid untillate 2006.

Ultra-Wideband: Ultra-wideband is a potentially disruptive new wirelesstechnology that delivers very high-performance wireless network servicesover relatively short distances. Some view it as Bluetooth on steroids,but its significance rests not only in its higher speed but also in thefact that it has forced government policy-makers to consider newperspectives on traditional models of spectrum regulation. As its nameimplies, ultra-wideband devices will use much wider blocks of spectrumto deliver data and will share this spectrum with other wirelessdevices. This hints at future regulatory models that will leverageemerging cognitive radio technologies to facilitate the intelligentsharing of spectrum by multiple applications. While ultra-widebandproducts will make their way to market in 2005, the lack of a singlestandard will act to stifle broad market adoption.

RFID: RFID is probably one of the least understood wireless technologiesoutside of key vertical markets. In its simplest form, RFID provides amore sophisticated version of the bar-code technology that adorns nearlyevery retail product you purchase today. However, while scanners must beplaced in very close directional proximity to the product to readcar-codes, RFID enables scanning across a broader physical area. Keyearly markets for RFID include large-scale logistics such as militaryapplications as well as supply chain. Wal-Mart has gained significantattention with its efforts to add RFID tags to product palates, a movethat is expected to significantly enhance the company's productdistribution efficiencies. Expect those kinds of initiatives to gainmomentum during 2005. Future applications of RFID with tags attached toor embedded in specific products will come later, in 2006 and 2007.Dave Molta is Network Computing's senior technology editor. Write to him at [email protected]