INDUSTRY VIEWPOINT - Don't kick a Lan when it's down

David Spokes, international marketing manager at Telxon, lends a voice of support to wireless Lans.

There's an old saying that goes: 'Put three doctors in a closed room and you'll get four opinions.' For some reason, the reverse seems to apply in IT. Get a bunch of boffins together on the pages of a highly regarded magazine and you'll inevitably end up with a shared opinion.

The casual observer may reasonably assume that all these experts must be right, but sometimes I do wonder. Take the 'Connect Flaw' wireless Lans article (PC Dealer, 13 January). The observations of some respected people appear to be at odds with our market experience. Could they be based on misconceptions born of trying to jump ahead of the game in a market which is not quite ready? This attitude tends to result in making excuses, rather than looking positively ahead.

While office-based wireless Lans are far from being the norm, radio activity in the workplace is growing rapidly as if business depended upon it - which, in many cases, it does. Spread spectrum wireless solutions have been installed by some of the world's biggest names in retail, warehousing, logistics and manufacturing. The placing of computing power into the hands of the workforce has led to a revolution in the way many companies do business.

Migration to the office environment is now only a matter of time and delays may be because of the many misconceptions perpetrated by some suppliers unable to offer a broad systems base rather than technical fact.

For a start, blaming the shortcomings of 802.11 is a poor excuse. It may not address load balancing or the algorithms which permit roaming, but this does not necessarily reduce throughput. Admittedly, if you mix 802.11-compliant products, the system will function down to the lowest common denominator. So the solution is don't mix - at least, not until manufacturers have fixed the interoperability issues.

Many companies investing in wireless networking will contest the view that it cannot deliver the user's requirement and is just too complex to support and set up. Why then, are they investing? The claimed failings of 802.11 products and the belief that they are 'not very clearly defined' are very worrying.

Most manufacturers have been closely involved in the standards committees and research bodies for years, so such a claim would suggest profound indifference to what has been achieved.

Then there is the analysis column on 802.11, which states: 'One of the problems with wireless standards is that they are all aiming to share the same available spectrum.' What on earth does that mean?

And finally, where did the comment about two separate versions come from?

There is one 802.11 standard which encompasses direct sequence (DS), frequency hopping (FH) and infra-red and there are more DS systems in use around the world than FH, probably because only DS has the technical potential to deliver the very high data rates customers believe they are looking for.

Come off it people - just because you haven't cracked the office Lan market is no reason to cook up excuses. It is going to happen. Okay, so 802.11 doesn't mean true interoperability, which may still be a few years away, but there are products available with more than adequate data rates.

The truth is, the packages are available and they work. If you don't believe me, put the companies to the test.