Are Apple's iPads about to overwhelm corporate networks?
The research firm Gartner says that unless businesses plan for it, they could require three times the amount of wireless coverage in order to support the iPad on corporate networks.
The issue? Well, iPads are bandwidth hogs, and they have weaker wireless radios than most laptops. That means that -- just like most mobile phones -- they can't connect to an access point as well as a laptop. And with more and more iPads and phones coming on the network, companies that want to support them are going to need to bump up Wi-Fi access points ... a lot.
That's what's been happening at Paul Hastings, an international law firm that's decided to allow visitors and employees to use their iPads and mobile phones on a special Wi-Fi network that's separate from the company's corporate LAN.
Paul Hastings has provided Wi-Fi to visitors for about seven years now. It's critical for them to be able to use the internet to check documents or access email while visiting the firm's offices, where wireless carrier networks don't always get through.
But mobile phone and iPad use on this network has exploded in the past three years, says Searl Tate, director of engineering at Paul Hastings. "There are probably five times as many devices on the network now."
At first, the company wasn't sure it needed to permit these new devices at all, but Tate says that about three years ago iPads and smartphones that were really good at surfing the web "sort of forced our hand."
"I think the inflection point was the introduction of tablets, specifically the iPad and high-performance smart phones," Tate says.
With five times the devices on its wireless network, Paul Hastings is now rolling out a wireless upgrade that will boost its capacity tenfold.
The company is also throttling bandwidth on its wireless LAN, which seems to be a very good idea. An analysis of network traffic by corporate wireless appliance provider Meraki found that iPads use about four times the network bandwidth of mobile phones.
And that's likely to go up with the upcoming iPad 3, according to Kyle Wiens, CEO of online document site, iFixit.
"Wi-Fi bandwidth saturation hasn't been a huge problem with the iPad yet, but I expect that to change soon," he says. IFixit thinks that the iPad 3 will have four times the pixels of the iPad 2 and all that hi-res content is going to chew up networks. "Higher resolution content will be at least double that size, dramatically increasing the bandwidth consumed by iPad users."
In a worst-case scenario, companies may roll out enterprise-wide wireless networks and then find that they are not up to snuff when it comes to hooking up iPads, says John Merrill, Director of Product Marketing with Xirrus, the company that's selling Paul Hastings its new Wi-Fi access points.
"You almost need to reshuffle your access points throughout the whole facility to compensate for those tablets."
Having fun bringing iPads on your corporate network? Drop us a line and tell us about it: robert_mcmillan at wired.com
