Wireless LAN Equipment Shipments Up

MrBounce writes "Worldwide shipments of wireless local-area network equipment increased by 120 percent in 2002 from a year ago. So who are the current market leaders in this field?"

Comments

Innovators pay the price of leadership

[BWJones]

Boy, given that Apple was shipping wireless on their computers back in 1999, it is interesting to see that they don't seem to be represented here. It could be due to a small market share I suppose, but Apple has paid the price for leadership again and again by innovating and then everyone else jumping on board.

Re:Security?

[thegameiam]

it's funny - there are two approaches to Wireless:

1) try to create wired-equivalent security, with WEP, et. al.
This usually results in "security" which can be cracked by a persistent teenager in a car in under about 20 minutes.

2) leave everything "open" and make sure that all security is host/application based. Treat the network as "untrusted"
Personally, this is where I stand: I think that it works better, and people don't get any unrealistic impressions about the security of their connections.

So I run a WISP which is built upon the latter model, in Washington DC. If someone wardrives and snoops some internet for an hour, fine! pleas don't attack the network itself, but feel free to surf the web :)

-David Barak

Re:Security?

[mhore]

So what percent of them have WEP disabled and SSID-broadcast enabled by default? Can I now wardrive to find 120% more open APs? Ironically, Microsoft branded routers are some of the few that do have WEP enabled out of the box.

This is something I've been wondering ... I just don't know the answer. At home, I enabled WEP and disabled SSID-broadcast. I don't have much faith in WEP, but it's better than nothing, right? Anyway, with SSID-broadcast off, is my WLAN essentially invisible? Or could somebody "see" the packets still, and know something was there?

Mike.

The Future of Wireless

[eniacx]

If you don't know what a Mesh Network is, you should read up on it. There are some very cool applications.

You can fly in a helicopter at 300 mph+ and sustain an Internet Connection.
City governments are also using this technology to deploy cameras around their cities.

Any kind of technology is always scary when government gets ahold of it. However, I still have some questions about it's security though.

http://www.meshnetworks.com

So really...

[afidel]

Cisco is 28% of wireless lan revenue since they own Linsys now =) I find it interesting what this says about the overall market, Cisco/Aironet which is the large enterprise leader slipped behind Linksys in revenue even though the typical Cisco/Aironet product costs ~8X what the typical Linksys product does, so small companies and consumers must be outbuying enterprises by around 8X =)