ABI: Nearly 1 Million Small, Medium Businesses Candidates for Early IEEE 802.11n Adoption
October 22, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
Retail, real estate, warehousing and transportation are among the small and medium business (SMB) market segments that could prove fertile ground for adoption of IEEE 802.11n equipment, according to ABI Research, assuming vendors can find the right channels to reach them.
"Small businesses tend to buy from retailers, office equipment stores and select value-added resellers," said ABI Research vice president Stan Schatt.
"Small businesses tend to buy small numbers of devices and trade them in more frequently than large companies. They also tend to be far less knowledgeable about technology and standards than large companies with dedicated IT personnel.
"The result is that small businesses are likely to buy [IEEE] 802.11n products while they are in draft status and deploy them immediately."
Many of those businesses will have employed Wi-Fi already, so what - apart from its greater speed and throughput - will prompt them to upgrade to IEEE 802.11n?
Analysts said one trigger is related to PC replacement cycles. Increasingly, when computers are updated, the new models will include IEEE 802.11n as a standard, built-in feature.
Several characteristics specific to the retail, real estate, warehouses and transportation vertical markets make them especially likely to benefit from IEEE 802.11n's new abilities. Warehouse operators have had problems with interference using conventional IEEE 802.11g. Analysts said IEEE 802.11n's multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) technology should reduce interference and make it possible to use Wi-Fi-based real time locating systems (RTLS) software.
Retail SMB establishments could benefit from the greater coverage offered by IEEE 802.11n, analysts said, and real estate - increasingly using Wi-Fi to transmit graphic images of homes - will likely add video applications as soon as they become practical. Deploying IEEE 802.11n will provide enough bandwidth to handle these tasks.
Analysts said these businesses will be "low-hanging fruit" for those vendors, distributors and retail channels that specialize in serving the SMB segment.
Source: ABI Research.