How wireless networks will work in real life
How wireless networks will work in real life
It's a bit simple minded to say wireless will replace wired networks, although one-day (10 yrs) that's very possible if there are serious distance and speed improvements (and of course there will be). What I believe will be the near future is mixed mode type networks. Obviously a pure wireless setup cannot work in an office enviroment but imagine mixing wired and non wired setups.
Imagine your 45 story office building with 450 users and having only one 48 port router. You wire up the buidling with a very lean 45 Cat5 lines (ahh a clean network closet is every network guy's wet dream). At the breakout box on each floor instead of connecting to another wire, and run a wire to each user we simply throw in a wireless router. Now all 100 users on this floor can connect to this router. You then put this on each floor and you even get redundancy here because we can assume users can connect to the floor above and below them, possibly giving load balacing if users connect to the fastest router.
I think this is the future of wired networks. Anybody that thinks a network goes 100% pure wireless needs to wait until we get 100mbit connections and they can run upto a mile. Of course with added distance you need even more encryption. Hence I think a mixed mode enviroment is very sweet and really cleans up your network closets.
PS: the pic is not our closet, but I felt a messy closet pic was appropriate here.