Conclusion: Next-generation Wireless Equipment

Conclusion: Next-generation
Wireless Equipment
WLANs are becoming more than practical; they are becoming an ingredient
essential to your communications needs. The combination of handheld
PDAs and wireless connectivity is important for larger and more
diverse companies to maintain information regarding inventory, eliminate
errors, and increase overall efficiency through having information
on demand.
Wireless devices are becoming important not only for corporate network
usage but for numerous applications within the following industries:


Healthcare

Retail

Manufacturing

Hotel

In the healthcare setting, practitioners require constant access to
handheld PDAs in order to retrieve patient, drug, and record information
at a moment’s notice.
Retail solutions, like those described in the previous sections of this
chapter, give mobile point-of-sale terminals access to inventory, pricing,
and sale information.

In the manufacturing industry, WLANs can deal with changing materials
and information needs.

Even the hotel industry uses the WLAN to help employees stay connected
so they have all the information they need to instantaneously serve
the needs and desires of their customers in the most efficient way possible,
without being tethered to a terminal. The problem is, of course, others
in this environment can intercept the personal information of guests.

Established security really fails when it comes to adequate security,
competitive standards (i.e., Bluetooth), deployment costs, network management
functionality, system complexity, configuration issues, and
finally the system interoperability between different wireless equipment
vendors. 201