Johannesburg, 23 Jun 2014
Having swept the globe, the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon is evolving, says Martin May, regional director, Extreme Networks.
The number of mobile devices - and their diversity - is growing rapidly as are the numbers of employees who are willing to pay for and bring their own devices to work in order to improve their efficiency and performance levels.
Research group IDC reports an expected compound annual growth rate of 78.4% in this market over the next five years - an increase beyond all expectations - with a key driver being the extension of the BYOD movement to embrace wearable devices such as Google Glass headwear and the iWatch smart watch.
Market watchers expect a large proportion of field workers, including those in construction, warehousing, security and policing, will likely be outfitted with headgear since it will free their hands and allow for easy sharing of visuals.
We can also expect to see fast adoption in retail, medical/hospital and other customer-, patient-, client-facing roles, so that information pertinent to customers can be readily accessed and shared in real-time.
As a result, user expectations for fast and seamless access to the corporate network and the Internet are no longer confined to indoor spaces. As users demand much more in the scale and scope from their mobile connectivity, Wi-Fi networks are being forced to evolve to address much higher capacity and scale.
Today, in preparation for the imminent explosion in wearable BYOD traffic, non-disruptive wireless LAN scalability is one of the top considerations in the WLAN evaluation process.
Addressing this development, Extreme Networks has released the 3865 802.11ac WLAN outdoor access point, an important addition to its IdentiFi Wireless LAN portfolio. This development makes IdentiFi one of the most complete and scalable enterprise Wi-Fi solutions addressing both indoor and outdoor wireless connectivity available.
IdentiFi wireless delivers more applications and throughput to users with fewer access points. Extreme Networks now offers market-leading scale and performance for a variety of other complex enterprises as well as large outdoor venues such as sports stadiums.
For example, Extreme Networks is currently working with the National Football League (NFL) in the United States, where over 70 000 users gather in stadia and watch videos and upload to social media.
From a technical perspective, IdentiFi provides increased capacity with three times better over-the-air performance compared to 802.11n. It also offers greater throughput with air-to-wire transition, supporting 75 000 packets per second for both indoor and outdoor APs.
Moreover, Extreme's Gigabit Wi-Fi achieves full 802.11ac gigabit speeds and functionality with 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) for the indoor 3825 access point.
The 3865 outdoor AP extends IdentiFi's high performance capabilities and scale beyond the brick and mortar by offering complete parity for software capabilities and functions associated with the indoor solution.
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