Non-Profit Tech Blog

I’ve been wanting to adopt new technology to provide better Wi-Fi coverage to our remote locations. Generally speaking, more Wi-Fi coverage either means more wireless access points or repeaters. This is, for a me, a no-no. My experience is that the more items you have to take care of, the more often they’ll screw up in aggregate. Those of you who know your stats knows how this works

So, the best scenario would be to seek out a Wi-Fi solution that doesn’t increase the number of items that IT would have to support. Hence, I’ve been looking at the 802.11n standard of Wi-Fi that has been marketed by Linksys and Netgear. Especially, this item: the WRT54GX. Unfortunately, we also have the issue of money (trying to achieve non-profit IT goodness by futureproofing the purchase) that impacts the size of my purchase sweetspot.

Of course, these locations already have Wi-Fi so whatever I purchase has to work with the existing base of 802.11b and 802.11g cards that the users have got.

So I’ve got three criteria going on at the same time (I assume this will be familiar to other IT purchasers at other non-profits)

• Low TCO – reducing the amount of TCO by reducing the number of service calls because there are simply less things to take care of
• Even lower TCO – reducing the amount of TCO not for that particular device but for the particular function that the device serves by reducing the number of upgrades over a given period of time
• User acceptance – it’s got to work with current Wi-Fi devices

And who is there to get in my way? What is stopping me from getting to that sweet spot? It’s Airgo and Broadcom. These two companies are bickering over the draft of the 802.11n standard. But we’re close though… Apparently, the draft should be ready (if all goes well) by end of summer.

Confessions

Should I be really griping over a few hundred measly bucks? I still think, yes. The cost of installing and then upgrading items (especially in a short timespan of a few months) in terms of time, expense and annoying the user is pretty high.

Can users withstand multiple upgrades over a short period of time? I doubt it with the possible exception of security upgrades. On the other hand, given appropriate caveats and disclaimers, I think I may have one set of users who would gladly trade in their current 802.11g AP for a MIMO AP before the standard was set. The balancing act is never done!