Devinator

While some aspects of Wi-Fi have a common future, such as architecture becoming fully-distributed, there are other aspects to be considered as well.  I’ve said before that you can’t be everything to everyone or be great at everything, and that’s true of wireless infrastructure as well.

So what’s to become of Wi-Fi in the end then?  Here’s my highly-opinionated, and perhaps wrong, version of the future of Wi-Fi…

Wi-Fi technology will stabilize and mature to a point where there’s a smallish feature differential between vendors in each class (SOHO, SMB/SME, ENT), and will be deterministic, inexpensive, and reliable enough to replace Ethernet as the primary access technology.  It will be relatively easy to manage (again, depending on class), and from a cost standpoint, it will be a commodity across the board.  All through this process, we will see vendor acquisitions, some that will make no sense at all.

There will be 2-3 Wi-Fi vendors who think they can solve every problem well enough, when added to their big-name branding, to win any deal.  That will be a case of drinking too much of their own koolaid and will be limited to the largest vendors only (who can afford to kid themselves).  These large vendors will duke it out in every large deal until the end of time or until one or more of them dies or eats another among them.

There will be smaller vendors who specialize on verticals and/or specific market segments (like the mid-market), doing application integration, building a partner ecosystem, and possibly making Wi-Fi just one of their offerings alongside other software & hardware… and sometimes professional services.  Some mid-size vendors will specialize on more than 1 vertical, but rarely more than 2 for fear of defocusization.  Yes, I realize that’s not a word, but if you get my meaning, I’m good with it, and you should right-click it and add it to your dictionary unless you’re using a Mac.  :)

It’s only a matter of time before the wireless technologies that aren’t going to make it fail (how’s that for predicting the future?) and the ones that are left can prove minimal differentiation.  Then, my buddy Matthew’s favorite political quote comes into play: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

At that point, “Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi”, and it just works… at least well enough to make most customers happy.  The smaller players will have a much better integration story within their area of specialization, and it will be hard for the big boys to compete in those spaces, especially when the smaller players have dozens of reference accounts that are directly applicable.  The big boys will have a stranglehold on large accounts, just from an organization/relationship standpoint, locking the smaller players out.  Haven’t we seen this with Ethernet already?

Standards and feature sets will be mature enough by this point that nobody will worry about having different vendors supplying Ethernet and Wi-Fi.  That argument, which I hear now, will be short-lived.  What I think will happen is that those who buy both Wi-Fi and Ethernet from the same vendor will do so for support and vendor relationship reasons, not technology reasons.  There will be still be the occasional case of proprietary feature integration though, and it’s unlikely that will ever go away.

By the time most of this happens, we’ll have 802.11ac, .11ad, WiGig, Wireless USB7 (j/k), and other new wireless technologies to deal with.  There will be cross-standard and cross-technology problems that make most wireless admins want to intentionally OD on pain killers, and they will look to vendors who serve their vertical/segment to fix “all that stuff” before coming to their table.  

After that, it’ll start getting crazy. :)  If you’re wondering whether transitioning into the wireless market is a good move, I’ll tell you plainly that there will be no shortage of jobs for the foreseeable future.  You just need the qualifications to successfully compete for those jobs against a global talent pool.