Wireless Intraoffice Networks

One-line summary: Issues surrounding wireless communications are briefly presented, with an emphasis placed on office deployment requirements.

Overview/Main Points

• Wireless overview: All of the usual issues surrounding wireless communications are presented, including benefits and difficulties, cellular architectures, radio and IR propagation characteristics, frequency assignment politics, wideband and CDMA vs narrowband, etc. Virtually nothing new is presented in the paper.
• Issues regarding offices: Integration of voice and data services will be crucial, implying data throughput and latency requirements of the wireless system. Many "tricks" like antenna diversity, effective coding and modulation techniques, and the use of CDMA will be required. Office environments adversely and unpredictably affect radio and IR propagation.

Relevance

Flaws

• While the article was technically accurate and succinct, there was nothing new in this paper.
• I gained very little perspective on the challenges of wireless computing specifically in offices from this paper; the challenges presented seem to be independent of office environments. I suspect this article was intended to advertise wireless technology in a journal that MIS people read.