Where's my Wi-Fi?

It seems like Wi-Fi is everywhere: New deployments are announced on a weekly basis, Intel has committed to putting 802.11 into anything with a microprocessor, and even McDonald's is jockeying for wireless fast-food style. Today, however, Wi-Fi is offered in fewer places than you might think, and most of those places are Starbucks. As for the technology itself, connectivity seems to be limited to PCMCIA cards.

But give it a few years. According to Kagan World Media, by 2011 the Starbucks café/restaurant hegemony will fall and Wi-Fi will see a more even spread of availability among hotels, convention centers and other public places. In addition, The Aberdeen Group expects the network card to go by the wayside as manufacturers start installing Wi-Fi radios and chipsets directly into PCs and handheld devices. Even the access point isn't safe — Aberdeen expects service providers to deploy more switch architectures in the future, nullifying the usefulness of most access points.

Figure 1: Where Wi-Fi is going....

Figure 2: ...And what it's going into