The wire-free advantage

The value proposition of WLAN is especially attractive as it is the quickest, most flexible and economical strategy for building or expanding networks, writes Vinita Gupta

Estimates put the market for wireless products and applications, i.e. the total wireless market in India for 2008 at approximately $120 million, with $50 million for wireless network gear alone.

The Indian wireless market has witnessed a CAGR of 40% driven by all segments of industry as corporate set up Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) to complement their wired infrastructure, and more pervasive wireless networks are established by IT organizations.

The high growth will come from WLAN SOHO and home applications. The standard 802.11n will create exceptional uptake of technology as it has improved speed and security features.

The standalone fat Access Points or wireless LAN routers have been the most commonly deployed WLAN equipment. However, with increased size of wireless LANs spanning across tens to hundreds of access points, many enterprise customers are transitioning to centralized controller or Thin AP-based WLAN solution. Such a solution is robust, highly secure as well as easy to deploy and manage. SOHO wireless routers will continue to dominate the home and small business segment.

Growth drivers

The primary driver for the growth and the adoption of wireless by any organization is directly proportional to the growth of laptop penetration, to the increase in the availability of mobile applications, and a solution-led focus that includes third-party applications on a wireless platform.

Paramjit Puri, Business Development Manager-Advanced Technologies, Cisco Systems, India & SAARC, said, “As Wi-Fi becomes more secure and there is tighter integration between wired and wireless networks, we will continue to see more growth taking place in the adoption of wireless and mobility solutions across various platforms and industry segments. We are also seeing the beginning of various applications being developed on the wireless platform for various industry segments.”

“As notebook PCs are increasingly becoming the norm rather than the desktops, the shipment of these notebooks with built-in wireless LAN access cards is boosting the growth of wireless LANs in all market segments,” said Alamuri Sitaramaiah, GM-Sales, Fluke Networks, India.

Ashok Saraf, Manager, Wireless Product Marketing, Extreme Networks revealed that according to the market research done by Tonse Telecom on behalf of the Wi-Fi Alliance, the WLAN equipment market in India is expected to grow from $23 million in 2007 to more than $275 million by 2011-2012. “The overall WLAN market in India is in its infancy and is poised for healthy and sustained growth. Hampered earlier by lack of broadband connections and low penetration of WLAN enabled laptops and PDAs, the surge in laptop demand that is almost doubling every year is bolstering WLAN growth. The Government is committed to accelerating the deployment of broadband infrastructure,” added Saraf.

The demand for bandwidth is growing with that for wireless technology. [This however brings us to one of the current limitations of WLAN equipment. Wireless LANs are slower than wired ones and while the difference in speed is not a showstopper, it can be an argument against deploying WLAN when an application requires gobs of bandwidth. 802.11g tops out at 54 Mbps and while 802.11n is much faster, it still pales in speed when compared to Gigabit Ethernet. – Editor]

In today’s business environment, anytime and anywhere Internet access is necessary. This is also one of the major factors responsible for the growth of wireless networking in India. Consumer electronics, mobile phones and the IT security market will present further growth opportunities for the WLAN industry.

Mahendra Lalwani, Managing Director, ZyXEL India, mentioned that there is a huge upside in opportunities for the growth of wireless products and solutions since the market is maturing and growing, and people are realizing the benefit of a pervasive wireless network, which allows quad play services.

Andrew Hindmarch, Regional Product Marketing Manager, 3Com Asia Pacific believed that one of the reasons why WLANs are popular is that companies can avoid having to write off fixed network infrastructure when they move. This applies to any market segment, be it enterprise, SMB and SOHO.

According to a recent survey done by 3Com, organizations cited security as their most pressing concern when it comes to deploying wireless networks, followed by reliability. Given that most organizations responded that they had “deployed wireless networks in selected areas only”, with limited security features and coverage, these organizations may find that deploying a higher class of wireless equipment may address their concerns.

“2004-2005 was the year of WLAN equipment growth in India. Around this time, the Indian market was booming with SOHO and enterprise equipment users. Wireless growth in the industry is also leading to the adoption and deployment of WLANs. The WLAN industry is one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry today,” said Suresh Balasubramanian–National Sales Director, Linksys.

Emerging trends

There are two recent trends. One is the adoption of secure wireless solutions that actively blocks rogue base stations and unauthorized activity on the wireless network. Another is the adoption of 802.11n wireless solutions that use multiple antenna arrays to provide the capacity required for large numbers of users as well as supporting performance comparable to wired Fast Ethernet. WiMAX is emerging but it will take time to catch on. [Corporates have had a mixed response to early WiMAX (fixed) services. As of now, service providers are waiting for Mobile WiMAX spectrum allocation. In any case, WiMAX addresses a different market segment. Wi-Fi is for building or campus wireless networking. WiMAX is for last-mile, semi-urban and other outdoor wireless networking requirements. – Ed]

Puri pointed out that that we are seeing an increasing trend, whereby adding Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology to wireless networks—VoWLAN, businesses are further improving collaboration and responsiveness and discovering new ways to reduce cost. Moreover, the combination of RFID and wireless with Cisco’s Location Tracking Device and solutions is leading to new mobility applications and solutions for various industry segments including manufacturing, retail, healthcare, etc.

Wi-Fi or 802.11a/b/g technology has been around for some time and the only change had been in both indoor and outdoor APs becoming more feature-rich while equipment prices have dropped. What we are seeing is the maturing of the wireless market place and technology with some major enhancements and improvements taken place in making Wi-Fi more secure and integrated with existing wired deployments.

Saraf mentioned that WLAN technology has been rapidly evolving to offer enhanced security and support for real-time services like voice over WLAN. The emergence of new WLAN technology like 802.11n promises to deliver higher wireless speeds and coverage that is more reliable. Applications like Real-Time Location Services that leverage WLAN infrastructure are becoming popular for tracking mobile assets and high-risk patients.

“WLAN development is now with draft N 2.0, with speeds reaching 300 Mbps the wireless network has now become faster. With multiple radios, the N generation wireless equipment can eliminate dead spots and provide complete coverage,” said Jayesh H Kotak, Vice President–Product Management, D-Link India.

“Moving from wired to secured wireless in offices is the trend that we see in India. It is unlikely that companies will completely replace wired networks with wireless, but the demand for mobility is increasingly becoming the norm. The Indian market is moving towards Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi security,” revealed Hindmarch. According to him, wireless is not about “just extending” the network with wireless. It is about extending the flexible, secure and converged connectivity that will boost the productivity by increasing collaboration and providing easy and convenient access to information.

Hindmarch felt that interoperability is the key issue with WLAN. It is possible but difficult to get every single standard to work seamlessly together. Therefore, it is best to get professional advice if people wish to deploy new wireless technology like 802.11n. For example, enterprises deploying 802.11n should use a different frequency for 802.11n from the one that they used for 802.11b. If they wish to provide backward support for 802.11b, then there should be two wireless networks (802.11n and 802.11b) in place to support that. Running 802.11n on the same frequency as 802.11b to provide support to both 802.11n, and 802.11b devices is not an ideal situation and will cause deployment and user experience issues.

Sitaramaiah revealed that network managers are being increasingly challenged to support networks with new users, new networks brought in with the ability to deploy rapidly, new technologies (with the latest edition of IEEE 802.11n specifications) and applications, while still delivering the network reliability that security users and business managers demand. These trends coupled with security issues and breaches as seen lately, are resulting in network managers paying more attention to the need for planning and monitoring of networks. Wireless networking is no more just plug-and-play, and if not properly planned and managed, it can lead to critical situations.

The advent of WiMAX

WiMAX is capable of delivering broadband Internet and extending services like Internet telephony throughout India, without major disruption to transportation and other services. Unlike wired solutions, it does not requires blocking traffic to dig miles of trenches for telecommunication cables, ruining blocks of roads to provide Internet services, waiting on massive infrastructure build-out projects, or overhanging cables that can snap anytime. In a country like India, the last mile connectivity will be a critical necessity and WiMAX is expected to support peak data speeds of around 20 Mbps with average user data rates between 1 and 4 Mbps. “WiMAX may serve as a backhaul to connect wireless hot spots. The bottom line is that WiMAX will coexist with current wireless broadband technologies, rather than replace them. WiMAX can further complement mobile networks and act as a replacement for citywide Wi-Fi, as Wi-Fi was initially designed to be used indoors,” added Puri.

According to Kotak, WiMAX is emerging as the new last mile connectivity solution for SMBs and enterprises. Intel’s latest mobile chipsets come with embedded WiMAX. For notebooks based on older chipsets, which is most of the notebooks in use, WiMAX USB and PCMCIA adapters are available.

“WiMAX will continue to be the backhaul wireless technology and could be an attractive alternative to delivering broadband connections to homes and SMB customers. It is not likely to be implemented in laptops for quite some time,” stated Saraf.

Lalwani assured that in practical terms, WiMAX would operate similar to Wi-Fi but at higher speeds, over greater distances and for a greater number of users. WiMAX could potentially erase the suburban and rural blackout areas that currently have no broadband Internet access because phone and cable companies have not yet run the necessary wires to those remote locations.

Adoption by SOHO

Each market segment has its own potential story for growth. The SOHO/consumer market is buying wireless routers and access points. This segment represents a tremendous business opportunity for players aiming to provide superior technology at an affordable price point. Even at an individual level, the number of people using PCs is increasing phenomenally in India with rise in awareness and education.

The growth of the SOHO/consumer market will definitely give broadband a much-needed push. 2008-2009 could be the year of wireless broadband in India. The increasing growth of broadband penetration has been a key driver in the adoption of wireless technologies. According to TRAI, there would be 20 million broadband connections and 40 million Internet connections by 2010. This will internally drive the demand for wireless routers.

Kotak felt that the enterprise market has been an early adopter of WLAN in India, and this segment will continue to grow at the fastest rate. Laptop proliferation at SMBs and the availability of affordable broadband connections is spurring the adoption of Wi-Fi. The continued expansion of the middle class that can afford broadband connections and own one or more laptops will spur the growth of the Home/SOHO WLAN market. “Broadband connectivity is the major reason for Wi-Fi proliferation. These days it is common for parents to have laptops and children work on the desktop. Now to share the Internet every house will require a wireless router. With prices of wireless routers falling, it has become a household commodity rather than a luxury,” added Kotak.

Balasubramanian revealed that India is a unique market in terms of its sensitivity to the cost of both Internet infrastructure as well as its consumption. This means that consumers need to be able to have wireless connectivity with a minimal investment and need to manage their usage effectively. In addition, the Indian wireless router market is extremely price sensitive and the affordability of products is essential. At the same time, it is important that a lower price point be not at the cost of features. As a result, it is essential that the company have tailor-made products and strategy for this market.

“The SOHO market can benefit from reliable and fast wireless solutions because they may not need a structured physical wired infrastructure. Wireless gives SOHO companies the flexibility to enjoy the same level of connectivity as large organizations without the cost and complexity,” felt Hindmarch.

According to Lalwani, with a quantum decrease in prices of the broadband and wireless products, the upsurges in the SOHO segment is bound to happen and will be replicated in the home applications as well. This is apart from the upward trend seen in the enterprise and SMB segment.

Affordable broadband packages and falling prices of equipment will definitely attract the SOHO segment and make it a key target vertical for WLAN equipment vendors. Service providers are investing in adequate support functions to meet the needs of this segment.

Increasing globalization, competitive markets, and growing customer demand for agility are driving organizations to use mobility as a way to gain business advantage. Wi-Fi enabled notebook computers are proliferating and driving the adoption of enterprise wireless LANs (WLANs)—making businesses mobile.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com