You register with the hosting service, take delivery of the data terminals, mount them on your trucks, and you're done. All you need to manage your fleet is a browser. This is certainly a CIO-friendly operation. To take root, a technology has to attract users prepared to spend the time and money needed to make it practical for the next generation. As these users hammer away, experience accumulates, standards solidify and employees trained in the technology quit to become consultants.
Costs come down and reliability goes up.
A similar story could be told about two-way paging, the other great wireless data success story of the 1990s. In such sectors, prices will fall and reliability will rise more rapidly than in others. Of the three categories of wireless mentioned, fixed wireless probably clears the bar with the most room to spare. In fixed wireless all the features of the system, from signal strength and signal direction to the nature of the equipment, are known and controllable. This provides a huge technical advantage over mobile data wireless, which has to handle signals of various strengths coming from anywhere and going anywhere.