Wireless LAN networking: Plan it

A wireless network has several major advantages over a wired network. As you review them, consider how they might benefit your organization.

• Reduced cost of installation: It can be expensive to wire your building with Category 5 cabling to enable Ethernet capability or extend your existing capabilities. It may be significantly less expensive to install wireless access points and enable wireless support for notebooks, desktops, and printers (discussed in the do it section).
  
  
• Flexibility: If you regularly expand or reorganize your office, or need to accommodate a variety of network configurations, the rapid transition time from one configuration to other that wireless provides can help reduce your network down time. In addition, you won't have to incur the costs associated with physically rewiring office space.
  
  
• Convenient information access: The most exciting advantage of wireless networking is the ability to extend access to key information to anyone on your staff, from anywhere in the office, even when they aren't physically connected to your wired LAN connection. Do members of your staff regularly work away from their desks or stations, but could benefit from anytime, anywhere access to important data? Could you improve productivity by increasing access to important company systems? Do you have business processes you could streamline by reducing the number of times employees have to go back to their wired connections?

As you begin to visualize how wireless networking might play a role in your larger networking solution, you should next consider what integration points you'll need to address for the solution to work. Your wireless networking solution doesn't exist in a vacuum (unless of course you are building a complete wireless networking infrastructure from scratch that is).

To evaluate your current general networking capabilities and your future networking needs with wireless integration in mind, ask yourself the following:

• How is your current networking infrastructure configured? How many workstations, offices, and conference rooms are connected to the network? How many are not connected that you would like to connect?
  
  
• How many people use the computers and communications systems in your company now?
  
  
• Does your staff conduct business at locations away from their primary work area?

What kind of equipment does your staff use? Are they mobile with notebook computers and PDAs or do the majority of your workers use desktop systems? Do those who would benefit most from wireless, mobile access already use notebooks?

After you have a good idea of how wireless can improve your business processes and some insight into the integration points a wireless solution would have with your existing wired environment, you can begin to formulate a business plan for your wireless solution. The equipment you buy and the way you configure your wireless network will be driven by your business needs and plan, so it's important you have a clear plan before you spend any money on equipment or other resources.

Carefully define all of the ways you would like to use wireless networking and related technologies in your organization. If you have several ideas for ways wireless can improve your business write them all down and rank them in order of importance. Identify a potential pilot program you can use a to test a wireless integration. If you start small and plan to grow your wireless network (an easy thing to do), you have the opportunity to see if your wireless solution has the effect you thought it would and to learn more about wireless capabilities.