Untethering the enterprise

With an enterprise customer base spooked by rumors of WLANs’ lack of security, interoperability, and reliability, wireless vendors have spent the past year behind closed laboratory doors, trying to hammer out solutions to wireless woes.

The result of this R&D incubation period: an alphabet soup of new standards specifications that many industry observers believe are slowing corporate wireless adoption rather than speeding it up. Even so, 2003 has already seen a prerelease version of the new, supposedly more secure 802.11g standard — and with it, a resurgence of successful WLAN deployments.

Despite an air of mistrust, WLAN technology has shown steady deployment growth. The Wireless/Mobile Technologies Survey — a recent study by The Yankee Group — showed that 41 percent of enterprises surveyed already run a Wi-Fi installation and that an additional 27 percent intend to do so in the next 12 months. The results of InfoWorld’s own CTO Network Wireless Survey, conducted earlier this year, closely mirror those of the Yankee study, with 42 percent of InfoWorld survey respondents having already installed Wi-Fi access points somewhere on their networks and another 33 percent planning to do so during the next 6 months.

Memorial Medical Center is one enterprise in the midst of a deployment. “We simply had a need for it,” says O.J. Wolanyk, CIO of Springfield, Ill.-based Memorial Medical. Wolanyk’s team is working on a $30 million project designed to give doctors and nurses better access to patient records and diagnostics, while simultaneously improving patient-data security.

“When we examined project cost, a key consideration was [establishing an] untethered environment. Doctors and nurses need access to information while on the move. Wireless was a requirement,” Wolanyk says.

Another crucial factor in Memorial Medical’s deployment has been support for multiple types of end-user devices, including notebooks, tablets, and PDAs. “We’ll have approved client hardware, of course, but we don’t want to be locked into any one hardware platform,” Wolanyk says. Because of this, Wolanyk chose 802.11b over the faster 802.11a and 802.11g standards. There are simply more devices available today that support 802.11b without undue complications, he says.

Wolanyk’s deployment includes 300 Cisco 802.11b access points and uses ReefEdge’s Edge Controller 25 products — deployed in pairs for redundancy — to handle encryption, authentication, and roaming tasks. Although this significantly increased the cost of the wireless implementation, Wolanyk is adamant about the security of patient data. “It’s not a HIPAA requirement; it’s a common sense requirement,” he says, referring to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Upgrading the platform

Not everyone is fixated on maintaining a single platform, however, especially those who have deployed wireless for some time. “We’ve had wireless networking infrastructure deployed for about eight years,” says Brian Nevins, Director of Operations and Technical Support at the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) in Oshkosh, Wis. The EAA maintains an airport and its surrounding office campus, as well as additional offices in Oshkosh. It also hosts one of the most well attended air shows in the nation on an annual basis.

“During the week of the air show, we get busier than O’Hare,” Nevins says, referring to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. “About 14,000 people fly in during a 48-hour period, and we estimate roughly 50,000 people are camping outside.” This presents a significant challenge to EAA’s infrastructure because it needs to maintain and scale not only campus-based IT equipment but also temporary POS (point of sale) technology. According to Nevins, the EAA maintains between 6 and 11 POS stations in the airport and replicates POS data back to central servers via its wireless infrastructure.

Eight years ago, EAA realized that it would slide into an IT nightmare unless it revamped its systems to meet demand during the air show. Fortunately, Microsoft donated Windows licenses and introduced a partner company, Prsoft, which provided the POS software. AT&T implemented the underlying wireless infrastructure, and EAA wound up having one of its most successful air shows ever.

Soon after, however, EAA formed a relationship with Wave Wireless to provide its wireless infrastructure. With the vendor’s help, Nevins has deployed numerous wireless technologies, including 802.11b, the result of which is a mishmash of approximately 35 wireless access points and point-to-point links that don’t interfere with one another because they’re using different technologies, different frequencies, or both.

A point that Nevins is quick to make, however, is that despite the fact that EAA has implemented 802.11b, it did so primarily using directional antennas to build point-to-point campus links rather than to enable roving mobile workers because that was the business need it had to fulfill. Nevins is currently evaluating possible add-ons to his wireless infrastructure.

“We’re looking at deploying multipoint access points in addition to our directional antennas to enable roving service guys during the air show,” Nevins says. “That would allow us to have guys taking registrations and similar information on-site the way that Avis or Hertz has guys in the garage capable of taking your car reservation.

“We’re also looking at faster stuff like 802.11g or 802.11a, because we’re getting lots of requests from users for more throughput from the hangars,” Nevins continues. The problem he faces is that many of these buildings are built on skids for mobility. These structures move around regularly, so running wired links would be repetitively expensive.

Deployment trouble

Regardless of whether the chief technologist is deploying a new wireless infrastructure from scratch or is modifying an existing WLAN, proper planning and process are key, says Carson Holbrook, IT director at the Callaway Gardens Resort in Pine Mountain, Ga. Callaway recently built a $12.6 million, 54,000-square-foot conferencing center, called Southern Pine, with which to attract more corporate clients.

“We looked at deploying fiber to the conference floor, but wireless won hands down for low-cost flexibility,” Holbrook says. So Callaway employed Optimus Solutions for $30,000 to plan and deploy its Cisco-based WLAN network — a solution that wound up being a fraction of what an equally flexible wired one would have cost.

“We have only five access points deployed; yet we cover the entire conference area, our adjacent restaurant, and much of the surrounding outdoor area, so folks can walk outside and connect in the sunlight,” Holbrook says. He credits Optimus with a detailed planning process, followed by a no-nonsense deployment phase.

Memorial Medical’sWolanyk concurs, “Careful planning is essential to a successful wireless deployment, especially so in our case.” Wolanyk employed Denver-based wireless specialists Consolus to handle spectrum analysis and San Diego-based Daou Systems as its network integration contractor.

Daou provided Wolanyk 100 percent coverage with only 150 to 200 access points. “We had estimated slightly more than 300 originally. That really saved us quite a bit both in terms of time and money,” Wolanyk says.

Chief technologists also agree on the importance of proper application planning. “Try to map your application to your intended wireless infrastructure as closely as possible, especially when it comes to bandwidth,” EAA’sNevins says. In Memorial Medical’s deployment, Wolanyk has gone so far as to organize user groups to study their own work habits and report back what they feel to be the best ways to implement wireless across the organization.

“Being aware of your environment is also crucial,” Nevins says. “We’ve had folks bring ham radios onto the grounds and cause massive interference, but once this happened, we were able to counter it with directional antennas and access-point density.”

Fortunately, WLAN vendors have begun concentrating heavily on providing networking features designed to make both planning and deployment easier. ReefEdge, for example, announced a partnership with CA as this article was going to press, indicating that both companies would work together to integrate wireless device management more seamlessly within CA Unicenter using ReefEdge’s products.

“One thing that’s really changed in the last 6 months is that wireless vendors have figured out that corporations might want multiple WLANs on a single campus — one for security traffic, one for corporate traffic, for example,” explains Brian Chee, associate director of the University of Hawaii’s Advanced Network Computing Lab and co-author of Guerilla Wireless, due out this summer from Fluke Networks Press.

“Previously, they’d have stuck them on different VLANs [virtual LANs],” Chee says. “But lately Symbol Technologies and other vendors have begun building access points that can handle multiple service-set identifiers, which can then be mapped to different VLANs internally.” That means a single access point can act as the entry to multiple networks without the need for additional intelligence on the back end. This could ease management burdens on multiple levels, including bandwidth management, security, and QoS (quality of service).

Post-implementation implications

Even with advances in the Wi-Fi arena, those contemplating a WLAN deployment still need to carefully consider network management as a primary post-implementation concern. Most network managers look immediately for dedicated mobile management solutions when they think of WLANs, but smart money is on considering management as a function of application planning.

With omnidirectional access points serving multiple road warriors in a campus or MAN (metropolitan area network) environment, for instance, mobile management does become a real issue. But for directional antennas connecting access points into point-to-point links, network management can be fairly basic.

“We recently did a [link] from a building on one base to [an elevated] ridge line two miles away,” the University of Hawaii’s Chee says. “From there, we used a wireless repeater to shoot the signal down the ridge, 21 miles to another building in a different base. We used only two access points in that 21-mile jump, and all we needed to manage them were basic SNMP traps and a military-grade, third-party data encryptor.”

Most wireless vendors don’t view corporate IT network management as a top priority, according to SaroshVesuna, founding board member and technical chair at the Wi-Fi Alliance and senior director of strategic alliances and business development at Holtsville, N.Y.-based Symbol Technologies. “The Wi-Fi Alliance is not concentrating on network management at the moment,” Vesuna says. “Presently, we are concentrating more on ease of use from an end-user perspective and also interoperability.” That means enterprise-class wireless management tools will either remain basic or be proprietary to one vendor’s product line.

Technical support is another matter, however. “You get a much larger number of support calls using wireless, especially right after deployment,” Chee says. “Folks think they aren’t connecting as well as they might; some try and reinstall their NIC drivers, and you always get a segment that has trouble understanding how to use WEP [Wired Equivalent Privacy] keys.”

Future of wireless

While planning for the present is critical in today’s wireless deployments, planning for tomorrow is certainly not unimportant. What attracts most corporate customers to WLAN deployments today is either a specific application requirement, as in the EAA’s dispersed POS scenario, or a much lower cost to implementation than deploying standard MAN- or campus-wired infrastructure, as in Callaway’s conference center).

Leveraging existing wireless infrastructure to continue cutting bandwidth costs is an important part of planning present-day WLAN deployments. Yankee’s survey, for example, showed that 88 percent of potential WLAN implementers view wireless as a means to savings via operational efficiencies, whereas another 48 percent are looking to WLANs to reduce capital expenditures, including bandwidth costs.

But leveraging WLANs for continued bottom-line savings means examining the future of wireless technology, and one of the key trends here is the move to combine VOIP (voice over IP) phones and 802.11 infrastructure. Opinions on the maturity of this technology, however, are mixed.

“There are only a couple of vendors really concentrating on VOIP over 802.11 right now, mainly [Symbol Technologies] and Spectralink,” Symbol’s Vesuna says. “The problem we’re facing now is not interoperability but voice quality.” Even so, Vesuna expects to see significant improvement in VOIP-over-wireless product availability by the end of this year.

Ironically, folks who have deployed wireless VOIP solutions aren’t concerned about voice quality. Carl Ward, telecommunications director at Underwriters Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., deployed an early form of Spectralink’s wireless voice in Underwriters’ four-building campus. “It’s not strictly VOIP over wireless. This system deploys 802.11 access points throughout our campus and links these back to our PBX via CAT 5 cabling and our existing network infrastructure,” Ward explains.

Even so, Ward is quite happy with the solution both from a voice-quality and a cost-savings perspective. “Voice quality is great,” he says. “And while the system isn’t cheap — we started at $65,000 for the base system and that only came with 40 handsets — it has definitely saved us a bundle for those folks who were using cell phones before with lots of airtime in the local area.”

The University of Hawaii’s Chee is another proponent. “We’ve done VOIP over wireless for the last three years at NetWorld+Interop,” explains Chee, who is a senior member of the network operation center team that sets up and tears down the trade show’s highly sophisticated data network. “We’ve found that it works great in that environment. And it’s set for a boost this year, when you’ll be able to purchase access points capable of multiple [service-set identifiers]. That means I’ll be able to put my voice traffic into a separate VLAN and protect that traffic much more effectively and also solve roaming problems.”

Even more than VoIP, however, WLAN implementers are looking at multimode switching as a key trend to watch in wireless technology this year. Switching between wireless specifications takes two basic forms. First there is switching within a specific wireless standard, such as the ability to switch between 802.11a and 802.11b, for example. Another, more advanced form of switching will be the ability to switch or bridge between different wireless technologies, such as 802.11b and Bluetooth, 2.5G, or 3G wireless broadband.

Switching within the 802.11 standard is expected to see large advances this year. Access points that perform this operation between 802.11a and 802.11b are already available. Such devices are fairly easy to build because they work in noninterfering frequency bands — 5Ghz for 802.11a and 2.4Ghz for 802.11b. “Often you’ll see access points that simply contain the guts of two access points, one for [802.11]a and one for [802.11]b, that simply share common resources like the power supply,” Chee says.

Switching between evolving standards, however, will be more challenging. 802.11b, for example, uses the same frequency range as 802.11g. Experts say a mixed mode in this environment usually means defaulting down to 802.11b throughput. “We are working very hard on this problem, however,” Symbol’s Vesuna says. “The problem is that the 802.11g specification still isn’t final, so we can’t really gear up for true interoperability testing. You can expect to see significant improvements in this by year’s end, however.”

Switching between multiple wireless technologies meets with mixed opinions from the experts. Yankee’s survey shows that despite the fact that more than 60 percent of respondents say they use WLANs, another 24 percent are interested in broadband wireless such as 2.5G or 3G.

But while implementing switching or bridging between wireless broadband and WLAN technology seems to be something customers want, it’s a challenge that the Wi-Fi community isn’t keen on adopting just yet. Vesuna, for example, indicates that the Wi-Fi Alliance doesn’t consider this type of switching as part of its charter.

Other interested parties, however, do exist. The Open Mobile Alliance, for example, is a large vendor consortium, including companies such as AOL, Nextel, T-Mobile, and many others, all of which are looking to create seamless compatibility between various wireless technologies.

Still, seeing such innovation in the real world seems quite a ways off to implementers such as the University of Hawaii’s Chee. They simply don’t consider it feasible in the near future.

“The telecomm industry tried something like this a few years ago,” Chee says. “They called it the Universal Mobile Telephone System, and it was designed to allow a user on a handset to leave a building and seamlessly switch to a metro network and then to a satellite system when he roamed way into the boondocks.” The project failed because of a lack of vendor cooperation, exactly the kind of cooperation that’s required to make switching between 802.11b and Bluetooth, for example, possible.

Even with this somewhat dour view of vendor interoperability, it’s clear that WLAN and wireless WAN implementation aren’t waiting in the wings. Deployment and innovation are continuing at a rapid pace, making WLANs an effective IT solution — not next year, but today.