Field Guide to Wireless LANs for Administrators and Power Users, A

WLANs in Medium-to-Large Enterprise Networks

WLANs are being rapidly adopted in corporate settings, perhaps even more so than the Internet was, primarily because there is now an existing network infrastructure to which the APs can be attached. This parallels the Internet's rapid growth, because the catalyst there was a killer app (i.e., the World Wide Web) and the enabler was an abundance of PCs that had already been attached to a LAN. Adding IP to such a PC was easy. In a similar way, the deployment of WLAN infrastructures is enabled by the existing networks that have, by now, become ubiquitous.

Anyone who has a network can easily add wireless to it, simply by purchasing APs. The user-based access control that is integrated into products based ...