Considering that Wi-Fi started out as a home networking technology, is it any surprise that network managers are confused about how to deploy enterprise-grade wireless LANs?

Recent studies from market research firms such as IDC and ForceNine Consulting show that while there is a good deal of optimism concerning the future ubiquity of WLANs in the corporate world, large deployments are still predominantly limited to the vertical markets of health care and education. To make matters worse, as the industry begins to standardize on enterprise-class protocols, the very standards promising to bring order to wireless are adding to the confusion because they are continually in flux.

"It's important to remember that the wireless LAN enterprise market is just now reaching the phase of broad market adoption," said Paul DeBeasi, vice president of Marketing at WLAN switch vendor Legra Systems. "To build an enterprise-class WLAN, you have to start with traditional networking technology and integrate that with both radio and security technology. Of course, there are standards for all three of these, but can you be sure that they will all work well together? For customers, the key issue isn't deciding which of the various protocols are best, so much as figuring out how they'll go about integrating them all."

Why Are Enterprises so Skittish?

ForceNine recently polled 50+ CIOs to analyze WLAN momentum in the U.S. corporate market. They found that there are a number of barriers to WLAN adoption in the enterprise, including concerns about cost, interoperability, standards, and security. "While enterprise CIOs have a number of worries when it comes to wireless, their number one concern, overwhelmingly, centers on security," said Dr. Sam Book, a partner at ForceNine.

Since security was a much lower concern in the home market, issues of encryption and authentication were initially given a low priority. Now, as WLANs are poised to take over the enterprise market, their lack of enterprise class capabilities is slowing them down a bit. Due to the early problems of WEP, which was based on a weak encryption scheme, WLAN vendors are being forced to re-evangelize the advantages of mobility, while assuring potential customers that those highly publicized security flaws have gone away.