Wireless Summit - Day 3 recap

I have been attending Gartner's annual Wireless, Networking, and Communications Summit the last several days.  If you have been following my blog, you know that I have been providing daily recaps of the event sharing what I thought was the most interesting and relevant information.  Without further ado, here is my "trip report" from the last day of the show:

The morning keynote was the "Mobile and Wireless Scenario" by Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst, Nick Jones.  While there were many excellent points, my key take away was the increasing importance of context aware computing.   Mr. Jones said that context aware computing will be a driver for a shift in the focus of mobility from device-centric applications to people-centric services.  While most of the examples given during the presentation related to cellular phones, I believe we are also going to see an increase in both the importance and adoption of location services within the Wi-Fi arena. 

One of the more interesting points of the day was brought up in the Analyst/User Roundtable titled "Tactical Guidelines for the Next Steps in WLANs".  Gartner Research Director Michael King spoke about the fact that many cellular carriers are moving back to metered data plans.  The interesting thing, Mr. King noted, was that metered data plans are driving the need for enterprise WLANs to pick up the slack, so to speak.  With unlimited data plans, it made no difference whether someone used the cellular network or the enterprise WLAN as long as the end user was satisfied with the network performance.  With metered data plans, many organizations are pushing their users to switch over to the enterprise WLAN to save money, especially for high-bandwidth applications such as streaming video. 

Yesterday I mentioned that I was pleasantly surprised to see a conference Wi-Fi signal in 5 GHz.  Today, I was surprised not to see any signal.  To qualify that a bit, the Wi-Fi network was up during the conference, but as soon as the show was over, the signal was no longer available.  It was there one minute, gone the next.  In fact, it disappeared so quickly that it makes me wonder if they had the wireless network on some time of time based control mechanism.  After all, the conference staff can't be that fast in packing the equipment... can they?

If you want to join in on all the fun next year at next year's summit, mark your calendars for May 2-4, 2011 in San Diego, CA.  Also, keep an eye out for my daily recaps from INTEROP Las Vegas next week!

Related Articles:

• Wireless Summit - Day 1 recap
• Wireless Summit - Day 2 recap

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