The traditional choice between leased lines and fiber often brings some unhappy trade-off in delivery, cost, reliability or bandwidth. Bridging these trade-offs is what wireless does best, but not all wireless is the same and missteps can spell disaster.
Wireless is a real mystery. We don't wonder half as much about how a signal passes through a cable or how nineteen billion instructions are processed on a pinhead. These are technological givens, yet it's hard to fathom how data travels intact through the air. We might question it, doubt it, imagine all the things in the atmosphere that could foul it up. Rain, snow, fog, cold, migrating geese, solar flares - you name it.
Adding incoherent fuel to the fire is all the specious information generated by vendors with competing motivations. It seems that few wireless vendors can get their facts straight, even industry leaders. Before the Web, vendors were more careful about what they printed. The same truth in advertising doesn't seem to apply to the digital page.
Generalizations about "wireless" or "radio" make it harder to get at the truth. Consider the AM and FM bands on your own home or car radio. AM and FM are both "radio", but if you lumped them together you'd be selling FM short. AM crackles and fades in a rainstorm, while FM comes in crystal clear, regardless of weather. When was the last time you didn't get solid FM reception due to rain, fog, blinding snow, solar flares, comets, flying squirrels or anything else? Would music fidelity be improved if it was piped to your home across cable TV lines instead of the airwaves? Mine isn't. Now, if I told you that point-to-point microwave is based on FM technology could you more readily conceive that it may be more reliable than leased lines or that you couldn't tell it apart from fiber?
We've all heard a wireless horror story, but usually the problem is a wrong product fit for the application and so understanding the fundamental distinctions between wireless categories is key to avoiding a similar fate. "Wireless" with all its various name forms, acronyms and incarnations can mean just about anything. It's what it means to you that matters most.
My intention is to impart to you the things I know about wireless, stemming from my introduction of the first microwave radio for Ethernet (1987) and supported by nearly a thousand related installations. This discourse is about common sense, not specmanship and the goal is to give you a confident enough handle on the subject to capitalize on the wireless opportunity and avoid its pitfalls.
