2003: The Year of Wireless

The year 2003 will go down in history as the Year of Wireless. This is the year that the number of wireless hot spots will mushroom, and the number of people using Wi-fi will explode. Experts expected that the number of Wi-Fi products sold in 2002 would be about six million, and it’s estimated that the figure will double in 2003, and be at about 33 million by 2006. Other industry analysts predict that there will be over 40,000 hot spots by the end of 2006, up from somewhere over 2,000 now.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />


 


At the time of this writing, the final figures are not yet in on the actual number of Wi-Fi products shipped last year, but we think that they are a drop in the bucket compared to what will be shipped in 2003. We think 40,000 hotspots by the end of 2006 would mean that the wireless networking industry was dead in the water in 2002 and never went anywhere.


 

Our prediction is that there could be 40,000 hotspots in the xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />U.S. by the end of the summer, and that by 2006, there will be hardly a square inch of urban or suburban space that won’t have wireless access to the Internet. We think that the number of Wi-Fi products shipped this year will be much more than half of the estimated 2006 figure of 33 million.

 

What makes us think this? More and more homes have multiple computers, and wireless networking in the home has already begun to take off. As more and more families become accustomed to a digital lifestyle, communicating with each other and with friends via e-mail over the home network, as well as through cell phones and PDAs, we will quickly become accustomed to using WLANs as our main mode of contact, just as e-mail has become the primary tool in interoffice communication. Further down the road, as variations of initiatives like Microsoft’s .NET take hold, and the Internet becomes even more central to our digital life than it already is, we will become more and more dependent on the Web for our basic applications, as well as the information we get now. Add Internet phone calls to the list and you can see how integrated into our lives the Internet will become.

 

Consumer electronics will soon have Wi-Fi built in. Not just your computer, but your stereo, your refrigerator, your heat and AC systems, your electric blanket, and any other electronic device in or around your house. Maybe even the dog. We’ll use it as commonly as we do the phone, and pay for it the same way, as part of our phone or some other bill.

 

Price, as always, is an issue. Nobody’s going to pay $40 per month for Wi-Fi for very long. The cost to the end user will eventually drop below $10 per month, and then it will be hard to justify not having it. This significant a price drop will happen by 2006, probably before that.

 

Wireless networks are slowly being adopted by corporate IT departments. The big stumbling block is the weak security still pestering Wi-Fi, but that is a bug that will be squashed eventually through technologies like Wireless Protected Access (WPA), the 802.11i protocol, and stronger measures to follow  (though probably not to the satisfaction of the corporate community this year), and then, look out for the wireless steamroller. For the general population, security isn’t nearly so big an issue. Most of us are boring enough that probably nobody really cares what we’re doing anyway, and we should perhaps be more flattered than offended if someone does.

 

By 2006, the nation will be all wireless. We will look back, and think about the long slow rise of Wi-Fi and wireless technology. We’ll look at this year, 2003, as the year it all came together, the year that wireless really took off. It’s time for Wi-Fi now.