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The Age of WiFi
An awkward licensing regime was a big roadblock in the largescale adoption of
WiFi—till about a year back. The regime required users to take individual
licenses for each node connected to the wireless network and in case more nodes
were to be added, more licenses had to be procured. The government has now
delicensed the indoor use of WiFi in 2.4GHz (802.11b), setting the market on the
proliferation path.
The earliest adopters of the technology continued to be the biggest markets
for WiFi —hospitality, airports, and educational campuses. The year saw some
WiFi implementations cutting across industries, from manufacturing (Asian
Paints, Imperial Tobacco Company) to banking (HDFC bank, Punjab National Bank)
and even government (INS Valsura). In fact, there were also a few e-governance
projects that involved WiFi implementation.
However, other enterprises by and large continued to shy away from adopting
WiFi — mainly due to the cost differential between wireline and wireless
equipment, and a perception that there is little to gain by going in for WiFi.
The situation could change in the near future as WiFi equipment prices have
tumbled sharply in recent times, bringing them within striking distance of costs
for similar wireline equipment.
On the client side, Intel launched its Centrino platform for notebooks, which
integrates built-in WiFi support on the processor. Big notebook vendors like IBM
and HP started selling notebooks with multimode (802.11 a, b and g) support. In
times to come, WiFi is slated to be the de-facto standard for laptops and
notebooks to get on to the network. The market also saw many new product (access
points, NICs, WiFi routers) launches by vendors including D-Link, Enterasys and
Cisco, with improved security and support for higher traffic and higher
bandwidth standards like 802.11g.
The total market size for primary WiFi products (access points and PCMCIA
cards) was around Rs 12 crore in 2002-03, according to Voice&Data estimates.
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