Underwritten in part by Extricom, a designer and manufacturer of high-performance, next generation WLAN infrastructure solutions, these findings show the critical importance of new technological approaches that increase simplicity, even as the drive for greater performance and multi-application support continues.
The report, ‘Measuring the Real Value of Wireless LAN Deployments’, is the first to quantify the business value of this technology, and highlights how this value is further enhanced by the addition of non-traditional applications such as voice and video. However, the research also finds that a major expenditure in terms of human capital, tools, and processes has been necessary to truly unlock such value, and that only the ‘best-in-class’ organisations have had the means to do so.
“The research makes it clear that wireless technologies can deliver great operating benefits to organisations,” said Philippe Winthrop, research director for wireless and mobility at Aberdeen Group. “However, it also shows that, to become ‘best-in-class’ adopters of traditional WLAN systems and seize its promised productivity and collaborative benefits, a significant investment in time and resource has been required. Our research recommends organisations not be deterred, and instead pursue the value of this technology, especially with value-enhancing applications such as voice and video. But the research shows end user organisations need to further improve the return on their investment by challenging WLAN vendors to lower the overall complexity of WLAN solutions.”
“In our vision, the hurdles to maximising the value of WLAN are eliminated, since our channel blanket WLAN technology removes the traditional complexities still found in many WLAN offerings today,“ said Gideon Rottem, CEO, Extricom. “Extricom is committed to increasing the ROI of WLAN through our high-performance, multi-application platform that decreases project complexity, cost, and risk.”
Extricom’s patented Interference-Free WLAN System represents the next generation of enterprise Wi-Fi, with a fundamental shift in architecture, from “cell-planning” to a “channel blanket” layout. This eliminates the co-channel interference that plagues traditional WLAN systems, to deliver seamless mobility, ‘wire-like’ connections, greatly increased capacity, and guaranteed levels of connectivity for all users. All without the error-prone and costly RF cell-planning of traditional solutions. The result is a high-performance yet simple solution for powering the enterprise triple play of data, voice (VoWLAN) and video.
Winthrop concludes, “Best-in-class organisations have the opportunity to simplify and maximize their networks. This ‘one-two punch’ is however dependant on the underlying technologies they select.”