Wireless LAN Architecture, and Best Practices

[shankiepg]

hi,
Can somebody discuss Wireless LAn Deployment as a business model and illustrate with a case study if possible.

Thanks Regards
Shashank

[BER_vs_SNR]

Your question is so open-ended no wonder no one has answered for so long.

Restate your question more precisely.

Do you mean (i) how you go about justifying the use of WLAN technology for example as opposed to wired LANs in order to better carry out some business activity like customer service, or underwriting insurance, or designing chips, or whatever? Or (ii) do you mean a business model where you sell the idea deploying WLANs "per se" to organizations, people, companies for whatever reason and try to find out how you do it?

It is absolutely not clear what you mean.

Like everything there must be a motivation, a goal, which cannot be achieved otherwise, and the specific technology has to enable it. If it is internal deployment for example and if the answer to the previous quesion is yes, then you put a dollar value to the goal, a dollar tag to the technology (equipment, HW, SW, support, maintenance, etc.) and people needed to make it happen and calculate an ROI (return on investment) as the ratio. I will spend 100 and I will get 150 in return or 2000 or whatever. If the ROI is significant you may have a case, if not then your idea for a business model has a problem.

If the deployment is external (like in Hot Spots) you must understand the environment, the objective, things that can go wring both technically and commercially, hurdles to scale, where the revenue will come from, how high will it be, customer's sensitivity to cost or pricing or location or modality, etc., costs associated with the business (e.g. profit sharing with someone else), assumptions that must be verified, and calculation of profit. That will tell you if you have a viable business model.

I emphasize the word "assumptions". My 20+ year experience says this is by far the place where most business plans fail. The soundness of assumptions, how well they have been researched and verified, what-iff scenarios and alternatives, etc.

Hope I have helped you to think this through a little more.