Mobile and Wireless Technology

Overview

The mobile and wireless industry is entering an exciting time. Demand for mobile technology is growing at a tremendous rate. Corporations are deploying mobile applications that provide substantial business benefits, and consumers are readily adopting mobile data applications. Exciting new mobile devices are constantly being introduced, and wireless networks are providing access to data from almost anywhere. In short, mobile and wireless technology has matured to the point where it is ready for wide-scale adoption.

Actually, mobile applications have been successfully deployed for many years, but these have been largely the effort of early adopters, who have gained a clear competitive advantage by implementing a mobile solution. Wide-scale deployment of mobile and wireless applications is just starting to take place. Corporations are just beginning to realize the benefits that mobility provides. Oddly enough, many of the advancements are taking place in the enterprise market, contrary to early industry hype, which was largely focused on consumers. There are both business and technical reasons why this is taking place.

Return on investment (ROI) has become an important figure for determining whether to implement a mobile solution. It is pretty simple really. If a company can foresee a reasonable return on its investment, it can justify building the application. If it cannot, then the application will have to wait. It is much easier to determine the ROI for internal business applications than it is for consumer applications, so they get implemented first. On the technical side, corporations have much more control over the technology being used, so they can build applications that require specific hardware, software, or network connectivity. This allows them to deploy a variety of application types that can run in either online or offline modes. There is no such control over the consumer market, often limiting the type of applications that can be deployed.

Definition of Mobile and Wireless
The definition of mobile and wireless varies from person to person and organization to organization. In many cases, the terms mobile and wireless are used interchangeably, even though they are two different things. Let's start with the term mobile. Mobile is the ability to be on the move. A mobile device is anything that can be used on the move, ranging from laptops to mobile phones. As long as location is not fixed, it is considered mobile. Areas that are not included in our definition of mobile include remote offices, home offices, or home appliances. While these are definitely remote, they are not considered mobile.

Wireless refers to the transmission of voice and data over radio waves. It allows workers to communicate with enterprise data without requiring a physical connection to the network. Wireless devices include anything that uses a wireless network to either send or receive data. The wireless network itself can be accessed from mobile workers, as well as in fixed locations. Figure depicts the relationship between mobile and wireless. As you can see, in most cases, wireless is a subset of mobile; but in many cases, an application can be mobile without being wireless.



Figure : Relationship between mobile and wireless.
For an application to be considered mobile or wireless, it must be tailored to the characteristics of the device that it runs on. Limited resources, low network bandwidth, and intermittent connectivity all factor into the proper design of these applications.

Wireless applications that are not mobile use fixed wireless networks. These are wireless networks that provide network access in a fixed environment. An example is a wireless local area network (WLAN) that is used to give desktops network access. Many businesses as well as home users are installing WLAN technology to avoid having to install network cables throughout their buildings. Another example is network access via satellites in remote locations where there are no other connectivity options.

On the other side, we have mobile applications that are not wireless. There are many examples where this is the case. Any application that can be used on the move and that does not have wireless connectivity fits into this category. This includes many laptop and personal digital assistant (PDA) applications. Until only a few years ago, it was actually rare to have wireless data access for mobile devices. For these mobile applications, data is often synchronized using a fixed connection and stored on the device for use at a later time. It is worthwhile to note that even though these applications do not require wireless connectivity, they can often benefit from it when it is available. A sizeable portion of this book is dedicated to looking at these types of applications, which are referred to as smart client applications.