Wi-Fi Deployment: A Survey of Large New Zealand Organizations

Wi-Fi (also known as IEEE 802.11b) has proved to be a viable technology for wireless local area networking applications in both business and home environments. There has been a significant growth in Wi-Fi networking in recent years, both in applications and as the subject of academic research papers, articles in the IT press and research house reports. How much of this material, predominantly based on overseas experience, is relevant to New Zealand’s earlyadopter context? This paper reports on a survey of large New Zealand organizations focusing on the level of Wi-Fi deployment, reasons for non-deployment, the scope of deployment, investment in deployment, problems encountered, and future plans. Survey results show that most organizations at least have considered the technology, though a much smaller proportion has deployed it on any significant scale.