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     corporate networks

This page considers corporate wireless networks, operated by SMEs, large businesses, academic and other institutions and government agencies.

     introduction

As at the beginning of 2004 there were several thousand non-public wireless networks in offices, schools and other entities across Australia and New Zealand. That number is growing.

Wireless networking in Australasia - like that in Europe and North America - took off in closing stages of the 1990s dot-com boom. That reflected -

• falling prices for wireless cards in laptops (and, more broadly, in other personal computers), coupled with growth of the laptop market
• falling prices and increased availability of wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs)
• investor willingness to put money into hotspots and the infrastructure, including billing systems, that would allow roaming by commercial customers
• relaxation of regulatory constraints
• competition among a handful of ISPs and support from particular hardware vendors, notably Cisco, Juniper and hp
• media coverage underpinning perceptions that wireless access had desirable attributes (eg was funky or made business sense for individual users and organisations) or did not involve inappropriate risks
• appreciation among ICT managers in government, business, academic and other organisations that WiFi offered a cost-effective mechanism for construction and maintenance of local area networks (LANs) - discussed here - potentially with bridges from those intranets to the internet

Most wireless networking in Australia and New Zealand has involved corporate networks - ie facilities intended for use only by the particular organisation's staff/affiliates - and accordingly don't enable public access to the individual intranet or wider internet. (In practice, deficiencies in network establishment and maintenance mean that many wireless intranets are open to casual or malicious users - without authorisation - an issue noted in our discussion of wardriving).

Commercial developments have concided with rollout of wireless intranets across many academic institutions (eg the Australian National University and Melbourne University).

   next page  (hotspots and hotzones)