IDC: WLAN Coming to Almost All Notebooks
Jun 27, 2003
Forrester may be predicting a WiFi crash, but with wireless LAN chipsets becoming standard for laptops, as this article suggests, it's pretty hard to agree with that prediction. The Forrester prediction is based on the fact that people won't want to pay for wireless internet access, especially in places where they may spend only a few hours, such as coffee shops and railway stations. This is a classic example of really short-sighted narrow-vision thinking. There are many other economic drivers for wireless - such as the need to actually get people into your coffee shop - that will drive access. Forrester astonishingly predicts a much brighter future for Bluetooth - hard to comprehend given the format's 10 meter range. That technology has utterly no chance of success in less developed nations, where Wi-Fi is being touted as the key to internet access. It is not going out on a limb to say that Forrester is dead wrong on this call. One wonders what they could have been thinking.
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