I recently spoke with Alan Cohen, VP of marketing and product development at Airespace. Airespace sells Wi-Fi network equipment to large companies, hospitals, schools and even a few airports.

While Wi-Fi took hold quickly in homes and small offices, large enterprises have been slow to embrace the technology. Objections have included security, costs, integration and, when all else fails, ROI. Perhaps the greatest obstacle has been the IT manager who just doesn't want another network to manage.

Yet Wi-Fi is addictive. And once a board member or CEO gets hooked on it, a full-scale deployment isn't far behind. I'll give Airespace a great deal of credit for riding out some lean times waiting for these big organizations to finally start spending money. Times now are good, and Cohen says the company is doubling revenues every quarter and will be cash-flow positive by the end of 2005. The company also recently landed about $20 million in additional VC cash.

Looking Beyond Internet Access

What's most exciting about Wi-Fi in large enterprises is all the applications that have little to do with Internet access. For example, a hotel may install Wi-Fi for its guests initially but then realize that it can also use the network for curbside check-in, employee communications, etc. And it is these less-obvious applications that will give Wi-Fi an edge over proprietary wireless technologies in the years ahead. After all, if it's only wireless Internet access you want, Verizon Wireless has something called EV-DO that works comparably well.

What Wi-Fi offers enterprises that the major wireless carriers cannot is flexibility and control, which in turn enables creativity. This leads me to an application that is enabled by Airespace's location tracking feature. Once an enterprise has a network in place, it can use the network to track Wi-Fi-enabled devices, such as a phone, badge or RFID tag.

Cohen said that one of their customers is a hospital that has attached Wi-Fi tags to wheelchairs so it can track them. This hospital loses 110 wheelchairs a year (I guess the same way grocery stores lose carts) at a cost of roughly $10,000 each. This means that if the network helps the hospital cut its losses down to say, 10 a year, this alone will mostly pay for the entire network deployment.

And this is just one of any number of network applications the hospital will use; others include VoIP, doctor and nurse tracking, patient monitoring and medical device tracking. Wi-Fi, as a low-cost, ubiquitous and open technology, allows innovation to flourish. Once you build the network, the applications multiply.