Symbol: "The trouble with Wi-Fi..."

One of the leading makers of wireless LAN (WLAN) access equipment has admitted the technology is too expensive to buy, manage and upgrade.

Ray Martino, vice president of Symbol Technologies, said the high cost of wireless technology is partly due to the immaturity of the market but also down to the way 802.11x networks are being deployed.

Martino said: "The cost to install WLANs is high because you've got to put things into the ceiling. The cost to maintain is high too because you've got to go back to those access points in the ceiling to upgrade."

The answer he said is to remove the intelligence from the access ports and place all the complexity into a switch. That means removing most of the processing power and all of the memory - and effectively leaving just the radio.

He said this was akin to the network interface card in a traditional wired network topology.

"What we've done is centralise the intelligence," Martino added. "This is very much the wired networking model."

Enterprise class access ports currently cost up to $700. Reducing the intelligence takes the price below $200, Martino said.

Jason Smolek, research analyst at IDC, said: "WLAN vendors who can lower ownership costs by providing more features and functionality, and effectively address management, security and evolving wireless standards, will help organisations focus on improving workflow operations with the kind of innovative applications that WLANs are designed to support."

According to IDC the WLAN equipment market will be worth $7bn within three years. By 2006 90 million clients will have been shipped. Last year 6.5 million clients were sold.