WSJ covers Wi-Fi Advances

Donna Fuscalado, writing for the Wall Street Journal (subscription) provides a roundup of next generation Wi-Fi technolgies for a broad audience. There is nothing new in Fuscalado's article, entitled "Crowded Frequencies Trip Up Wireless PC Users" that has not been covered in depth in industry articles such as Patrick Mannion's article for CommsDesign this past July 2. But it is interesting that the mainstream media has picked up on this story.

Fuscalado observes that, "...consumers who were once delighted to go wireless are now complaining of Wi-Fi's slow speeds, limited reach and dropped connections." She lists a number of companies working to resolve problems with the existing 802.11 standard including Propagate Networks (which by the way has an interesting Wi-Fi blog, self-described as "shameless promotion" called WiFinally); Motia (which IP Inferno recently wrote about at the Supercomm conference); Airgo Networks (MIMO proponent); and Cisco division, Linksys (who recently announced new longer range antenna technology).

Fuscalado provides a chart showing projections by market research firm Forward Concepts for sales of Wi-Fi equippment. According to the chart, sales in 2003 (numbers of units) were 50 million, growing to an expected 250 million by 2007. This includes "client network interface cards, access points, and wireless router gateways." However, this does not seem to include non-computer Wi-Fi products, which Fuscalado mentions in her piece as another potential source of problems for Wi-Fi users -- (referring to a conversation with Paul Callahan, CEO or Propagate Networks) "...more and more devices will eventually become Wi-Fi enabled, which will only exacerbate the interference problem."