Research: The realities of wireless working

Tags:
WiMax,
Wi-Fi,
3G,
HSDPA

Rhetorik ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 24 Aug 2007 16:52 BST

Barriers to increased speed
Figure 7 presents the percentage of respondents rating each barrier as "important" or "very important" to their organisation.

The key barriers to increased network speed at this time were clearly related to cost and security issues. Costs of airtime, costs of upgrading existing business applications and costs/sophistication of the devices required were the three most important factors identified in this research. Security threats brought about by increased remote use and access to further applications on higher-speed networks, although fourth in terms of overall importance, were rated "very important" by nearly one-third of all respondents, and was second only to costs of airtime on this highest-importance rating.

Another significant barrier was concerns over the management and support of devices. A number of other barriers to uptake were identified and all were of considerable importance to these end-user organisations. However, lack of end-user demand was considered the least important of all possible barriers, confirming the importance of end-user pull as a driver of demand in this area.

Lack of end-user demand was rated a little higher as a barrier in the very smallest organisations, showing a degree of satisfaction with current mobile capabilities in these companies. However, of less concern to this sector were security and misuse of data issues, presumably because of the limited number of potential users.