Wednesday 21 May 2008

For most enterprises today, wireless LANs are either too costly, too complex or both. The basic problems that enterprises want addressed surround making the RF environment more reliable and performance more predictable – wherever users are. But today’s Wi-Fi systems don’t adequately address the things that make Wi-Fi go wrong such as extending range, interference and dealing with a constantly changing RF environment. The two biggest complaints surrounding Wi-Fi is that signals don’t reach and when they do they are flaky. This session examines new approaches and technologies that are being developed to solve some of these fundamental problems. Topics addressed include: dealing with interference, wireless meshing, 802.11n and quality of service.

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The promise of greater bandwidth has fuelled expectations that 802.11n is the trigger for the so-called “All Wireless Enterprise”. How can the promise be fulfilled for corporate networks, and will that be enough? This session looks at the benefits and implications of 802.11n, and discusses the possibility of Wi-Fi becoming the principal means of network access.

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FMC marketing is in full swing, and enterprises have expressed a great deal of interest. But so far, the rollouts and uptake of FMC services have been limited. Why the gap? Assessing the potential cost savings of FMC deployments is no simple task, as it involves call flows in the FMC architecture, cellular plans, the form of business reimbursement or payment of cell phones and the amount of inter-site and international calling. And, there is the question of whether users will be willing to change their behavior in order to achieve the desired productivity benefits. The speaker will help attendees drill down on the specific benefits and requirements for deploying FMC. Another important issue is “how stable is the entire FMC system?” The speaker will analyze the current state of readiness of handsets, Wi-Fi interfaces, SIP, handover triggers, battery life, and protocol extensions for mass roll-outs. A thorough discussion of the benefits of FMC will allow a deeper understanding of how, where and why this technology will genuinely be useful in an enterprise.

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Mobility has now become an essential part of many organisations’ working practises. The nomadic and roaming capabilities presented by Wi-Fi would appear to make this a prime enabling technology for mobile working. However, poor planning procedures and weak implementations for Wi-Fi systems have, on occasion, led to poor reviews of this technology in the press and promoted cynicism from network engineers.

Too many wireless networks are implemented without necessary surveys and planning taking place, leading to poor performance, data loss, security exploits and poor connectivity. In this seminar, we will take a vendor-neutral look at how to properly plan and deploy scalable enterprise-class wireless networks, delivering effective services. Focussing on how to avoid common pitfalls made by wireless network installers, this session will describe best practises for planning and deployment of successful wireless networks.

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