Think it’s time to close the patent office with respect to wireless LANs? Not yet – announcements this week from two industry leaders show that the rate of innovation and creativity in this space remains close to amazing.
Innovation across the board has always been the hallmark of the wireless-LAN industry, and one might think that, more than 20 years on now, we'd have everything we need at this point. Nope - innovation continues at a remarkable pace. Two examples of this fact surfaced this week, with significant advances from industry leaders Motorola Solutions and Meru Networks.
Motorola introduced a new high-end controller, the NX 9000. While this box is capable of handling up to 10,000 APs, of greater interest is its eventual evolution from controller alone to platform for applications. As controllers are basically single-board computers running specialized software, why not host that software on a platform capable of much more? And, indeed, Motorola is going to move in this direction over time. WRT the controller functionality, as we saw with Bluesocket's approach to controller virtualization with an increasing number of sites using their own VM-based servers running WLAN controller software, there will still be those who prefer an appliance, and that's what Motorola is providing here - but with the potential of scaling to enormous capacity and new utility. Motorola also rolled out a bunch of new indoor and outdoor APs.
Meru Networks also announced a new AP family, the AP400 Series, but this platform can have up to four radios (three internal and one added via a USB port), with each being three-stream, or, in other words, capable of up to 450 Mbps each - yes, that's 1.8 Gbps peak in a single AP! OK, some of you are wondering if anyone really needs that much capacity, and I remember back when 802.11b jumped all the way to 11 Mbps from the 1 and 2 which had been common to that point - same set of questions then as well. Well, one can never have too much capacity (see my previous note on this topic), given the growth in number of users, application demands, and the increasing popularity of time-bounded services being seen essentially everywhere these days. Meru also notes a reduction in the need for Ethernet ports - a good point as the economics of the enterprise LAN inevitably shift to a majority share for wireless.
So, how long does this level of innovation continue? I was speaking with a marketing executive at a wireless-LAN firm on this subject earlier this week, and again expressed my opinion that the remarkable advances in performance and functionality that have practically defined the WLAN space over the past two decades would, IMHO, begin to slow in the next three to five years. This based on my belief that a trend which has typified the life-cycle of high-technology products would within that period set in here as well - a trend we might refer to as reaching sufficiency. By this I mean that the products and services are essentially good enough to address almost any common application with very favorable price/performance, and that further innovations from that point would more likely be in the pursuit of incremental enhancements in revenues and profits (via product-line extensions), not the exploitation of new basic technologies. As an example, look at the PC industry today - four cores? Six cores? Some new super-bus backplane? Windows 7? Swell, but none of these in most cases really help me do my job any better. A slowing rate of innovation is thus inevitable, and actually has a significant if subtle benefit: IT managers can focus on applications rather than having to upgrade the plumbing so often. And those waiting for price/performance to stabilize suddenly have budget; we're looking at the WLAN industry easily reaching US$10B plus (annually and globally) over the next few years. And, sure, there'll be a shakeout and/or a consolidation - and it's really quite remarkable that there hasn't been one already.
While a slowdown in innovation is inevitable, I think, I'm heartened in knowing that, based on the kind of progress we see just in these two announcements, the systems we'll have at our disposal then will be simply incredible. I can't wait.
Oh, yes - Interop is next week in Las Vegas. I'm once again pleased to have the opportunity to Chair the Wireless and Mobility Track. I'll be attending most of these sessions; please stop by to say hello if you're in town - and I hope you will be!
