At the Wireless Mobility Symposium, I had the privilege of introducing/moderating the discussion on gigabit Wi-Fi and asking a lot of the questions. Here’s my quick summation of the gigabit conversation.

Hotspot 2.0 and the Next Generation Hotspot initiatives are possibly the most exciting areas of wireless progress occurring in 2012. For starters, these developments have a worldwide scope of influence. The technologies that come to market as a result of these programs will directly affect a large portion of the world’s population. If brought to market with extensibility, they could revolutionize the hotspot ease-of-use and security landscapes. These programs deserve the spotlight.

For us wireless folks that aren’t stellar routing and switching guys, one of the most daunting network tasks is integrating our WLAN infrastructure with the existing wired infrastructure and its services. Understanding wired design topics is pretty fundamental to installing or managing any network, so it really should be on our priority list to spruce up those skills. To give you a nudge on your journey, let’s talk about DHCP for wireless clients.

Three studies: Informa Telecoms & Media / Wireless Broadband Alliance, Cisco, and IDC. One conclusion: between now and 2015, Wi-Fi is going to explode.

Wait, I thought Wi-Fi had already exploded, or was already exploding, and these three organizations are now saying “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”? Thanks, BTO, for the catch phrase, and the answer to that question is a resounding “yes”.

OK, I admit, I had to look it up: 1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes = 1 million terabytes. Cool. Looking forward to that 1XB flash drive for Christmas in 2014.