Cisco, 3Com, linksys, and others are about to lose a lot of marketshare in wireless because their approach to wireless is not really "mobile." They designed their access points to happily talk with a person sitting with a laptop, but do NOT handle a person walking around with a PDA, roaming from access point to access point.
The problems this creates with access points which "lock in" to a laptop and then fight with other access points instead of gracefully hopping cells, have been resolved in industrial wireless applications for a few years, but as far as I know, only Symbol has developed this technology, at least for 802.11. As we move into the third large revolution in computing, from Desktop to PDA, Symbol will be taking an unexpected lead because they had to fix this problem a few years ago in warehouse installations, where mobile wireless PDAs have been used for nearly a decade. The best Cisco access points just plain won't work in a warehouse mobility environment, for example. I would like to see some open source standards which address mobility roaming techniques in the same way that Symbol has already developed, such as inter-accesspoint protocols. Are any of you aware of such projects? Symbol wants to keep their techniques proprietary, of course, so it's a matter of developing them from scratch for the open source community. Curious to know if such efforts are already begun. -Jared ps, as i see it, the first revolution was the mainframe; the second was moving from mainframe to desktop, the third is moving from desktop/laptop to handheld/pocket devices. After that, the idea and core infrastructure of pervasive computing will be in place. Maybe the fourth revolution will be embedded CPUs in everyone, which are neurally accessible, but that's a few decades away.
