I was meeting with a potential client and we began discussing their business drivers for deploying wireless. We often ask this questions of companies and we normally get the typical responses:

1. Our (insert exec title here) has wireless at home so now we have to make it work in the office
2. Cisco gave our CIO a great sales pitch
3. We have some special applications that require mobile devices that can only connect via wireless (VOIP phones, bar code scanners, mobile printers, etc.)
4. Its for our conference rooms and other gathering places that are inconvenient to plug into

Well this company was quite a bit different and I think quite forward looking. Their belief is that wireless costs less, is easier to secure, and gives them more flexibility over wired network. Period. No caveats. Most IT people can buy part of the flexibility argument, but only in certain locations or specific type of work environments. No one in IT that I have ever spoken to would dare argue the security and cost element. Let me lay out their thought process.

First is cost. Today this company is in a growth phase and they are constantly adding new office space. To set up a new facility they have to go in, wire the building, put in physical security, furnish the office, assure there is power, etc. By far the biggest lag time they have is in wiring the place. If they can remove the need to roll out ethernet to every office and cubicle they assume they can decrease their new office roll-out time by over 50%. They obviously translates into serious cash.

The second argument is security. Like most large organizations they are trying to move to a NAC based architecture on the wired side of the network. 802.1x (port based authentication) makes a lot of sense and the added virus scanning/patch management/end point security elements of NAC in theory are great. But when you have tens of thousands of employees and thousands of switches and routers, the cost and complexity of NAC is overwhelming. But with wireless, 802.1x is basically built in. Flip on WPA2 on your access points (and/or controllers), integrate with that radius box and configure the existing supplicant on your microsoft laptop and off you go (well its not quite that easy but close). Wireless networks are indeed very secure today (when properly configured) and in this particular companies view a lot easier to roll out than retrofitting their existing network. Big security advantage…as well as even bigger cost savings.

The final issue was flexibility. This particular company is often having employees juggle their work space; moving from one cube to another, changing office, reconfiguring work spaces, etc. This seems to be a them in many corporate environments as organizations begin to tear down the cube walls in favor of “collaboration”. Well, being tied to a physical port puts a real damper on this and limits their movement to the distance their ethernet cable can reach. With wireless its move to your hearts content. Some wired bigots may say “but that ethernet port is so much faster than wireless, how can you abandon it?” Well with 802.11n that problem will be gone. So more flexibility at the same speed and bandwidth of that old stodgy ethernet port.

Pretty exciting stuff!