Comment Articles

Wireless networking moves up to warp speed

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 19 Oct 2001 17:02 BST

More people would use wireless LANs at work, if they could use them for just one application - data backup. If only they were fast enough, that is.

Proxim has now announced a steaming-hot, ultra-fast Harmony product, aimed at cracking the problem of backup of notebook PCs. But it has caused discord by going to a non-standard wireless solution.

On the face of it, Proxim has uncovered the Holy Grail. It has produced a wireless network that runs at 100 megabits per second - ten times faster than the fastest WiFi systems you can buy today (802.11b standard). But it comes at a price - and it's not just the cost of the equipment.

Rival suppliers are outraged, because although Proxim is selling this new Harmony model as "conforming to the 802.11a standard" it doesn't, in fact, conform to that standard in its high speed mode. The standard is limited to 54 megabits of data per second.

As one expert said, you do need to know what you're buying. All the good things you may have heard about wireless LAN solutions are true. It frees you up; you don't have to sit down at a desk to have access to your Internet data. You can work in a meeting room, the office canteen, even the pub over the road. But! - you aren't working at full wired LAN speeds.

What you can't do with current technology is backup your data. Not without making as many enemies as you have colleagues, anyway; if you transfer huge amounts of data across the network, it blots out the bandwidth available to every other user. And that's because the maximum data throughput is only 11 megabits - for everybody.