The migration to wireless LANS is very much underway in healthcare and many clinicians have moved away from the "traditional" desktop charting to the WIF-enabled laptop. Yankee Group, an analyst, predicts that in 2009, wired enterprise switch sales will decline for the first time in history due to wireless substitution.While Wi-Fi infrastructure is not expensive compared to other types of IT equipment, the current economic climate requires every expense to be looked at. The majority of LAN installations are overbuilt and include many unused ports. LAN edge switches were originally purchased based on a 2:1 or 3:1 ration of edge ports to workstations. Ethernet terminations are fixed, however uses move around, thus there are considerably more edge ports than users.It is suggested that healthcare enterprises take a survey of the individual port usage. StatSeeker is a software monitoring application that can track port usage. In one instance with a large State university that over a course of 3 months, 40% of edge ports had no actual bandwidth usage. The next step is to consolidate these unused ports to free up LAN switches. This allowed 90% of network closets to shrink by at least one edge switch reducing switch refresh costs and free up the budget for a pervasive WLAN. What are some of the cost savings that can be realized? Annual maintenance contracts tend to cost 15% of the switches original list price. Common 48-port enterprise class switches list for more than $10,500, so annual maintenance costs many times exceed $1575 per switch. Fewer managed devices in the network allows for more efficient and lower cost network operations. The elimination of the IT support costs to move, add, or change ports when users move is gone. Less power is consumed. A 48 port 10/100 edge switch even without PoE consumes around 143W continuously, and generates 609 BTU of heat per hour, which must be offset by cooling. At $0.10 per kWh, each switch costs $284 per year for power and cooling, all of which is saved if the switch is decommissioned. With the advent of 802.11n, savings can be significantly increased by shifting a substantial percentage of users to "primarily wireless" network access. I would venture that over 72% of employees today do not need Ethernet (wired) for network connectivity. I cannot tell you the last time I used a "patch cable" while traveling!
