The unwiring of the American office is moving into a new phase. The first phase
was wirelessly enabling computers using Wi-Fi — mostly laptops, later and to
a lesser extent desktops.
Now all kinds of devices with 802.11b built in are beginning to appear — multimedia
projectors, printers, video surveillance cameras, PDAs, phones. New after-market
Wi-Fi bridge devices will let you add just about any USB- or Ethernet-compliant
networkable device to a Wi-Fi WLAN.
Driving the market for Wi-Fi peripherals are chipset manufacturers like Intersil, maker of the widely used PRISM line
of Wi-Fi chips. Intersil’s silicon products appear in many of the new Wi-Fi
peripherals.
"There’s a whole bunch of things out there now with Wi-Fi built in,"
says Intersil vice president of marketing Chris Henningsen. "We still haven’t
seen this category really explode yet, but we think it will in 2003."
The recently announced Notevision
PG-M25X wireless multimedia projector from Sharp Electronics is a prime
example. The PG-M25X ($5,295 MSRP) uses an add-on Wi-Fi-to-serial adapter to
wireless-enable the projector. It lets any laptop (or desktop) equipped with
a Wi-Fi card connect to the projector in ad hoc mode and send presentations
from programs like Microsoft PowerPoint.
Other projectors are available from Sony, NEC, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Linksys
makes a Wireless Presentation Gateway you hook right up to a projector.
Intersil has been using some projector products internally for a few months,
says Henningsen.
"The reason we like them a lot is that we used to get into meeting rooms
with 20 people or so, more than one of them slated to give presentations, and
you’d end up passing the cable [to the projector] around, knocking over cups
of coffee and so on. [Wireless projectors] eliminate all that confusion. You
can just leave the projectors in one place in the conference room."
Wireless printers are also beginning to appear, though not, perhaps, as fast
as one might expect. Products such as Epson’s
Stylus C80WN ($450) are targeted at companies that have wireless networks
in place and want a networked printer.
But the C80WN is not a native Wi-Fi product. It’s actually Epson’s 2880 x 720
dpi, 4 color, 20-pages-per-minute C80N
product with the addition of an outboard Wi-Fi print server incorporating the
Intersil PRISM technology.
Hewelett-Packard also has an outboard Wi-Fi product, the WP110
Wireless Print Server ($300 MSRP), which lets you add any networkable HP
(or other) printer to a WLAN. Linksys has the similar WPS11
Instant Wireless Print Server.
Henningsen says Intersil’s own IT department is suddenly enthusiastic about
WLANs partly because products such as the wireless print servers promise significant
cost savings.
"The IT people in our own company were among the last to buy into wireless
LANs," he says. "But now they’re putting Wi-Fi cards in everyone’s
computer, even desktops. The reason is that now when they have to move somebody,
they can pick up their stuff put it down in a different place and it will work
exactly the same."
Intersil figures office moves cost $200 to $700 when they involve reconnecting
to and reconfiguring a wired Ethernet network. That cost is significantly reduced
when moving wireless gear. The fact that even networked printers are wireless
now makes it easier to think of going all wireless.
Wireless printers will also be good for small, growing companies that move
office space frequently. Henningsen notes that 97 percent of office space in
America is either not wired for Ethernet or the wiring is not accessible. If
all your network gear can now be wireless, it eliminates significant
wiring costs for companies moving into new spaces.
If sharing printers by networking them is a whole new concept, the availability
of Wi-Fi print servers means some wirelessly networked companies may now be
able to get by with fewer printers, Henningsen suggests.
Wireless peripherals can also enable completely new applications. Take the
D-LinkAir
DCS-1000W wireless Internet Camera ($330) from D-Link Systems. It features
built-in 802.11 and a built-in Web server so that it can be set up to be directly
addressed from anywhere on the Net.
Henningsen suggests that products like the D-Link camera could be used to provide
temporary security — set up the cameras and monitor them in a truck while the
special guest is on your premises, then take them down after she leaves.
"They’d also be great for trade show floors," Henningsen says. "There’s
always a good chance at any trade show that you’re going to have a high-end
notebook stolen. If you’re monitoring using one of these cameras, you’ll at
least be able to see if it’s one of the show floor workers — or one of your
own employees."
Peripheral devices with native Wi-Fi capabilities are still the exception,
but USB and Ethernet bridge products can Wi-Fi-enable virtually any networkable
device. Linksys, for example, has the WET11 Wireless
Ethernet Bridge ($110), a PRISM-powered unit that plugs into any Ethernet-enabled
device and adds it to a Wi-Fi WLAN. Similar products are available from D-Link and
SMC Networks.
With such briding products, you could include any existing computer, printer,
projector or surveillance product on your WLAN. You could even add something
like Linksys’s EFG80
EtherFast Instant GigaDrive Network Attached Storage (about $500), an 80GB
network hard drive unit with two bays that will each take up to 120GB drives
for a total capacity of 240GB.
The next big push that will put Wi-Fi into even more devices will come with
the emergence next year of multi-mode client cards in various formats including
the teensy tiny Secure Digital (SD) card format. Cards combining various flavors
of 802.11a, 11b, or 11g– or Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi plus one or more
mobile protocols (1xRTT, GPRS, etc.) — will make it even easier to Wi-Fi-enable
PDAs and smart phones.
A year from now, what isn’t wireless won’t be worth having.
