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Perhaps the true promise (or hazard) of wi-fi for business, says Gartner analyst Leslie Fiering, is its use as a "day extender"--as yet another way to bring work home. Fiering estimates that wi-fi raises the per-employee cost of a laptop by as much as 4% a year, about $325, depending largely on wi-fi access charges while traveling...
Some of that cost is justified by employees' improved productivity on the road. "I'm no longer a bottleneck [when traveling]," Gillespie says. Mallick says he doesn't even set his out-of-office message anymore for short trips. For well-paid knowledge workers, the cost of wi-fi is even more readily absorbed by the extra time they willingly spend on work at home. Because wi-fi makes it so easy to jump on the corporate network from your living room, more employees are working longer hours. Mallick, for instance, says that since he got wi-fi installed...
...that wiring has been shaping the way offices look--in some buildings, for example, walls are built not to support the structure but to carry cabling. Next year iAnywhere will move into a brand-new space on the campus of the University of Waterloo that has been conceived with wi-fi in mind. Patrick Simmons, a partner in the firm designing the building, RHL Architects, says wi-fi removes constraints that have become second nature to architects. "You were kind of tethered to the system," Simmons says. "[With wi-fi], you don't have to have walls in a certain...
Instead, Simmons says, "you can go back to how the company sees itself." Sure, wi-fi lets you tear down the physical boundaries and work anywhere, but that's not necessarily what everyone wants. It turns out that what many of iAnywhere's employees really covet are conventional closed offices--walls...
Where does wi-fi sit on the winding road of wireless technologies? Nicely in the middle. Unlike with cell phones, however, you can't yet switch seamlessly from one wi-fi antenna to another...