Wireless market predictions for 2013

Ilan Rubin, managing director at Wavelink, has released his five wireless market predictions for 2013.

Rubin is predicting that:

1. Mission-critical wireless LANs will be deployed for density and applications, not just coverage, necessitating upgrade or replacement for even recently installed networks.

• Networks in industries with high wireless adoption (such as education, hospitality and healthcare) will need to be configured to support users who have three or more wireless devices.
• Applications will continue to be more demanding, moving from simple email/browsing to streaming video, voice, large data files etc.
• More background devices going wireless will add to demands on wireless performance (eg, printers, game players, media players such as Apple TV, security cameras, building monitoring sensors, health telemetry etc).

2. 802.11ac will start making inroads into enterprise by mid 2013.

• Complementary to 802.11n, but will not replace 802.11n in the foreseeable future as it is limited to the 5 GHz band only.
• Will require business devices to be equipped with support for 802.11ac.

3. Implementation of voice over Wi-Fi will accelerate on the back of more mature wireless networks.

• There will be more demand for dedicated devices with industry-specific features (robust, barcode scanner, duress) as opposed to typical consumer devices.
• At the same time, the use of wireless clients running off smartphones and tablets will also grow.

4. Adoption of mobile device management solutions will accelerate to cope with the proliferation of mobile devices and mobile applications.

• The use of smartphones and tablets at work will become the norm - both company issued and BYOD, necessitating the implementation of device and application management solutions.
• 74.7%* of organisations will roll out line-of-business apps by the end of 2013, with 52%* of those expected to be being mission-critical. Managing those apps and protecting the data they’re accessing will be paramount.

5. The discussion in enterprise will shift past having the basic BYOD discussion to using mobile as a strategic initiative.

• Leading organisations will move from ‘consumerisation of IT/saying yes to mobile’ to ‘enterprisation of applications/tapping into mobile potential’.

*According to a survey of 501 IT professionals by Zenprise.