Reemergence of the WLAN Industry

Reemergence of the WLAN Industry
In the closing years of the past century a resurgence of interest has reenergized the
WLAN industry. This industry, which had an almost exclusively North American
market with an income equal to only a fraction of the cellular industry, suddenly began
to attract widespread attention in Japan and the EC as well as renewed interest in the
United States. In Japan, the restricted size of office spaces led to increased use of laptop
computers as replacements for desktop PCs. Logically, WLAN technology provided the
natural networking solution for laptop users. In the EC, the highly successful cellular
industry started considering WLANs as a part of their next generation of high-speed
packet data services. The motivation is twofold: (1) WLANs provide a practical answer
to the demand for high-speed data transfer, and (2) they operate in unlicensed bands
unburdened by the steadily increasing cost of acquiring licensed spectrum.
In 1999, the Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) Alliance was formed as a nonprofit international
association with the role of certifying the interoperability of WLAN products
based on IEEE 802.11 specifications. At this writing, the Wi-Fi Alliance comprises
over 200 member companies worldwide, and more than 1500 products have received
Wi-Fi certification. An especially significant recent development in this arena is the
emergence of public wireless LANs (PWLANs) serving hot spots in many areas of the
world. The Wi-Fi certification initiative has been instrumental in stimulating growth
in the use of wireless networking with laptop computers. Today, essentially all laptop
computers are being manufactured with built-in 802.11-compliant wireless interfaces,
and the use of public hot spots for mobile computing is growing rapidly. This segment
of the wireless industry is evolving rapidly as a variety of business models for
provision of public wireless connectivity are being tried.
In North American the successful growth of residential broadband Internet access
has opened a new window for a sizable market in home networking. These trends have
been catalyzed further by the emergence of new low-power personal-area ad hoc wireless
networking technologies such as Bluetooth and ultrawideband (UWB) for local
distribution, LMDS for home access, and indoor positioning for a variety of applications.
Availability of low-power, low-cost wireless chip sets started a new revolution in
consumer product development, raising hopes of sales exceeding hundreds of millions
of these chip sets per year. All together, these hopes initiated a boom in chip manufacturing
for WLAN and WPAN applications that continues. As far as technical directions
in this industry are concerned, they continue to be toward providing higher data rates,
comprehensive coverage, reduced interference, and lower cost. Further discussion of
these trends can be found in [Pah02a].