Thirteen vendors of wireless local network equipment, claiming to represent over 95% of the market, have formed the Wireless LAN Alliance to promote awareness of wireless local networks. Unlike other groups, the Wireless LAN Alliance is not planning to get involved with standards making or interoperability, since it does not want to overlap with the IEEE’s 802.11 standards committee, or the Wireless Lan Research Lab. Instead, one of its main focuses will be to provide an information clearing-house, including wireless local network application case studies and educational material, which will also be posted on a new Web site. The group also plans to sponsor educational seminars and panels; develop position papers; and create an advisory committee for the industry composed of customers, independent software vendors and systems integrators. Potentially, it may also get involved with lobbying – for example in those countries where wireless local network frequencies have not been freed up – but it has yet to be decided how much need there is for this, according to Wireless LAN Alliance president Jeff Abramowitz. The group is differentiating between fully-fledged wireless local net?works, and the kind of infra-red communications that is being included on many notebook computers (this is termed Personal Area Networks) and is only planning to deal with the first category. Abramowitz denies that the wireless local network industry has failed to communicate its message to users, saying that the formation of the alliance represents, perhaps, a better way to communicate to the audience. Buyers will have more confidence dealing with a vendor-independent alliance, he claims. While the market for wireless local networks has failed to explode as had been expected, Abramowitz nevertheless believes that it has now achieved critical mass – indeed, he says, there are now more than 100,000 customer site installation of wireless local networks. According to the researchers the Yankee Group, the market is currently worth $157m, and will grow to more than $724m by 1998. Founding members of Wireless LAN Alliance are 3Com Corp, Aironet Wireless Communications Inc, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, Harris Semiconductor, AT&T Corp’s Lucent Technologies Inc, IBM Corp, Norand Corp, Proxim Inc, Raytheon Elec?tronics Inc, Symbol Technologies Inc, Windata Inc and Xircom Inc.
