Wireless Summit – Day 1 Recap

You probably know that it's the start of baseball season.  What you might not know, is that conference season is also full swing.  This week, I am attending Gartner's annual Wireless, Networking, and Communications Summit.  Next week I will be at INTEROP Las Vegas.  For those of you unable to attend, I will be providing daily recaps of both events.

Yesterday's keynote was "Networks for the Next Decade - Smart, Virtual, and Ever Present".  It was given by Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, David Willis. One of the lines that I took away from this presentation was that enterprise networks are wireless by default, wired by exception.  This follows one of the key points I took away from last year's summit, which was that 70% of new access layer switch ports will be WLANs in the next three to five years.

This guest keynote presentation was given by Reed Hundt, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (in case you're wondering, he was chairman from 1993 to 1997).  Reed spoke about the decisions both the FCC and private industry made around the time of his tenure.  Mr. Hundt spoke in hind sight about what worked and what didn't.   He spoke how different things were 15 years ago and the foresight that was required.  I chuckled to myself about this last point - in 1994, I was trying to sell businesses on the idea of having a website.  I remember *literally* getting laughed out of the room on more than one occasion (after all, why would someone need a website? )

While most of the presentations yesterday were focused on traditional wireless & mobile topics such as Wi-Fi and cellular, I did attend a couple of sessions on topics such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and Social Networking. 

The session on RFID was a roundtable discussion led by Principal Research Analyst, Tim Zimmerman.  In this session, Mr. Zimmerman outlined some of the trends of the RFID industry, which he says includes a migration of more organizations moving from 13.56 MHz to 900 MHz passive solutions due to increased read ranges and a lower price point.  I attended training from RFID manufacturer, Alien Technology a couple years ago and was simply blown away by the read ranges.  While I thought of passive RFID as a short-range / proximity technology, I observed reads at 20-30 feet, depending on the type of material being tagged (and I am sure the read ranges have only gone up since then). 

One of the last sessions of the day was another roundtable discussion on "Getting Business Value From Social Networks".  This session was led by Vice President, Matthew Cain, and was focused on the processes and tools for using social networks internal to an organization. One of the more interesting discussions that came up was that many businesses are struggling to determine the specific ROI and justify spending related to social networking.  The group related this to the same struggle that IT managers were having justifying the cost related to having e-mail when it first came out within the enterprise. However, can you imagine the competitive disadvantage of NOT having e-mail today?  I believe that like e-mail, social networks have obvious value beyond the costs.  I also believe that over the next several years, it will be just as crazy to look back and think about how business was conducted *without* the processes & tools of social networking. 

Check back tomorrow for another daily recap of the summit, which lasts through Wednesday.  You can also read more by following my live micro-blogging of the event on Twitter under the hashtag #GartnerWireless. 

Douglas J. Haider is a Wireless Consulting Engineer with Xirrus. He hosts a personal blog at WiFiJedi.com, and micro-blogs on Twitter @wifijedi