Today I was asked, well where do both play and is WLAN going to displace LTE inside a hospital? Definitely not…both have their specific role and requirements. The WLAN will continue to be built out and support “internal applications”. While dual mode I-Pads, I-Phones, and Android devices will be constantly used, the physician will probably use the LTE network for “his/her” office and personal communications and when appropriate will jump on the internal WLAN to access the hospital say, EMR application. Again, it all depends upon the user experience and workflow. Hospital employees tend to go to work in the hospital and stay in the hospital. The will use WLAN data driven devices and WLAN enabled VoIP phones. Physicians tend to go to the hospital, other clinics, their offices, and highly mobile in-between. So at the end of the day, both wireless technologies definitely are needed and have their specific fit.
While I agree that both LTE/HSPA+ and Wi-Fi will continue to have strong use in healthcare, I think everyone, including physicians will continue to off load their wireless data to Wi-Fi whenever possible. One only needs to look at rising cost of cellular data to understand the motivation.
The biggest stumbling block to greater Wi-Fi use are largely policy driven. If a particular hospital has poor Wi-Fi coverage or restrictive policies that prevent the physician from doing their work over Wi-Fi, then they will certainly try cellular. But if Wi-Fi is widely available to them and they are able to do both hospital and other work over Wi-Fi, I believe that most will go that route.
David
Truely cost effective, stable mobile solutions for WiMAX and LTE are one or two generations from being competetitively compared. For those venturing beyond the Access Points nad Hot Spots, expensive, slow WLAN options are about all that’s there.
Mortonmanor, Know that this is long overdue, but agree with you in part. Cellular data costs are going way down, but the carriers desire to off load to Wi-Fi, (if they can ensure the QoS, hence the reason why they are purchasing http://www.veriwave.com.) Less costly it seems than having to increasing capacity in the macro. However stay tuned…all is changing in a rapid fashion with LTE. My feeling is that most hospitals do not understand this business model, thus they take the conservative. This needs to change. Thanks for your constructive input and perhaps we need to take off line. Happy New Year…2012.