The access the user has is typically more than 11 MBs or about 30 to 100 times faster than standard dial up or wireless WAN technologies. This bandwidth is certainly adequate to deliver a great user experience for a number of applications or services via the PC or mobile device. In addition, ongoing advancements with these wireless standards continue to increase bandwidth, with speeds of 22 MB.
There are currently two prevalent wireless LAN technologies being deployed. These technologies are the IEEE 802.11standards, primarily 802.11b and 802.11a, and the technology proposed by the HomeRF working group. These technologies are not interoperable with each other or with other wireless LAN solutions. While HomeRF is designed exclusively for the home environment, 802.11b is designed and is being deployed in homes, small and medium businesses, and large enterprises and in a growing number of public wireless networking hot spots. Several major laptop vendors are shipping or have plans to ship laptops with internal 802.11b NICs. .
Designing for wireless network requires new considerations than designing for wired network. An important factor is the tradeoff between radio-frequency (RF) coverage and capacity. Planning for both capacity and coverage is one of the key design issues for wireless LANs. WLANs use radio-frequency signals to communicate from a PC to an access point. This makes standards particularly important, since they reduce the risk that WLANs will interfere with or be affected by adjacent radio spectrum employed by public safety, military and commercial users (Trapeze). Another factor that plays in the design of wireless networks is the user expectations. Users expect applications to be as responsive on the WLAN as on a switched Ethernet network and to gain added benefits of wireless, such as mobility. Applications demands of an enterprise network make bandwidth capacity an important design requirement.
