REQUIREMENTS OF WLANs

Discussion of the requirements of WLANs brings us to an important question
posed in the previous section: What do the customers or users want? To some
extent this question has been answered in the previous section and will be dealt
with in Chapter 2. In this section some of the needs of customers from the point of
view of WLANs, services, and devices are discussed.
We start with the basic needs of the users and divide the users into business
and consumer types, see Section 1.4 and Figure 1.4. In the current market the
business sector gives prime importance to security, after which comes reliability
and availability, customer services, and data rate transfer. The consumer market on
the other hand gives prime importance to cost (which is of the least importance for
business) and then to data transfer speed and seamless connection. Here the term “seamless connection” should not be confus ed with “seamlessness” discussed at
the end of Section 1.4. Seamless connection, among other things, mainly means the
ease to connect. This need for the two markets is also given in Figure 1.6. This
difference in need is the reason for the current difference in the penetration of the
market in the enterprise and the residential markets.
Now let us look at another very important need of the users, the services.
Figure 1.7 shows the kind of services the business and consumer market need. In
both markets the prime need is e-mailing and then messaging. In fact it is
impossible to survive today for most people without e-mail and messaging is
becoming an even more common form of communication. Some companies have
adopted messaging as a formal way of communication between employees.
The kind of devices users want and their requirements for these devices is the
next important factor, as shown in Figure 1.8. For both the business and consumer
market the main requirement lies in convenience, simplicity, and performance. The
requirement for personalization is not that high at the moment but this will be a
very important requirement in the future. The maturity of a product usually fulfills
these requirements. Although 802.11 has passed several phases in terms of market
and technology, it is still in the midst of a boom era and maturity is still to come.
Technologies are being developed by different vendors to fulfill these requirements.