About a year from now, the first high-speed wireless LAN products will hit the market, promising to deliver a data rate of up to 54 megabits per second. That speed should give enterprise net managers plenty of time to assess their net requirements, scope out product plans, and address with vendors a range of critical issues such as technical support and software stability. These include installing many more wireless access points than today's wireless LANs need, higher power consumption for laptop interface cards, security, and remote administration and network management. Because of small differences in the way vendors implement the standards, interface cards from one vendor might not work with the access point from another.
Software drivers are flaky or have to be laboriously updated.
That's what one user discovered when evaluating wireless LANs. But we'd make a call to the support line, and you'd have to call three or four times, or you'd get forwarded to three or four different departments to find the right guy. Maers wouldn't be specific, but he says the products he evaluated were from the major manufacturers in the wireless arena. Problems Aside, Wireless LANs Prove Popular Like CoManage, other companies are turning to wireless LANs, even though wireless throughput still lags far behind faster Ethernet-switched LANs. You can't install wire, for whatever reason.