Wireless Gets Down to Business

Computerworld - From retail storefronts to the military's front lines, wireless technology now permeates nearly every sector of the U.S. economy. The technology has come a long way from simple bar-code reading with wireless PDAs. Today, tags affixed to retail garments taken into a dressing room can wirelessly signal a wall-mounted screen to display color choices and fabric information. College students can do research in the cafeteria instead of the library, and forklift operators can save themselves hundreds of miles of travel in factories by receiving product requests from computers mounted on their vehicles.
By the end of 2002, seven out of 10 companies had adopted wireless technology, according to a survey of 1,251 U.S. and Canadian companies in 18 industries by IDC in Framingham, Mass.
"Economics and technology are making wireless available to a lot more people," says Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "We're seeing it increase in its capabilities. People know what it can do, and they're working on projects that make sense -- updating them more into back-end systems."
Purchases of wireless hardware reached $2.2 billion in 2002 and are expected to top $3.9 billion by 2006, according to research firm In-Stat/MDR. Units sold will skyrocket from 18 million to 75 million in 2006, which suggests that the cost of deploying wireless will continue to fall.
To learn how wireless is being adapted to meet changing needs, we took a look at the most innovative uses of it in 10 sectors of the economy.
Education
The Challenges of Being First
Three years ago, Carnegie Mellon University was voted "Most Wired Campus" by the online publication Yahoo Internet Life for its pioneering use of wireless access in more than 30 buildings.
Today, five years after the university installed its first wireless LAN, administrators are looking to upgrade the system with new standards and faster speeds, which will require 1,200 new access points for the 7,000 registered wireless devices on campus.
It's a problem facing many institutions. Some 87% of schools and institutions surveyed by IDC now use wireless technology, and 90% say bandwidth and network availability issues top their list of technology challenges.
Rough estimates of the cost of Carnegie Mellon's upgrade are about $3 million, three times what the university has spent so far on wireless. What's more, funding isn't as plentiful as it was five years ago, says Chuck Bartel, director of network services.
But one simple truth has bumped the project up the priority list: "If you don't deploy it yourself, it