Will They Call Us Crazy in 5 Years?

Peter Karlsson, CommScope’s senior vice president of Global Enterprise Sales, made an interesting prediction at a recent conference in Dublin in front of scores of CommScope customers. No one questions that wireless connectivity has become an in-building necessity in rapid time. Will pre-installed wireless cabling become common-place in afew years?

Peter Karlsson, CommScope’s senior vice president of Global Enterprise Sales, made an interesting prediction at a recent conference in Dublin in front of scores of CommScope customers—customers who have great familiarity with structured cabling technology for office buildings and the like.

Peter explained how in the future that offices and other enterprise buildings still will feature lots and lots of copper and fiber cabling, as they do today, but that another wave of connectivity technology is coming fast, and that is wireless.

About 20 years ago, Peter explained, it was never a question that electrical and telephone cabling would be installed as a new building was constructed, but no one considered data connectivity back then. Afterwards, personal computing took off and companies starting installing parallel networks to network the PCs and carry the resulting data traffic. Soon, about 10 years ago, it became commonly accepted that when you constructed a new office building, it came pre-installed with power, phone and IT infrastructure.

“Today you’d look back and say, ‘Were those people crazy by not putting in IT infrastructure?’” Peter told the audience. “My prediction is that in five years people will look back and say ‘Can you believe those people built brand new office buildings and complexes and nobody thought about how you’re going to take care of all that wireless traffic? Why didn’t they install wireless infrastructure?’ So I believe there’s going to be another wave of wireless structured cabling that will be put into the buildings as they are constructed because it makes a lot of sense—financially and technologically.”

Is Peter correct? No one questions that wireless connectivity has become an in-building necessity in rapid time. But will pre-installed wireless cabling within the enterprise be so quickly adopted that it becomes common-place in just five years?