Forecast 2014: Boost your mobile bandwidth

Targeting Wireless

While Armstrong focused on providing as much wireless access as possible, Chicago's Advocate Health Care is trying to improve wireless access for specific needs, says Gary Horn, CTO and vice president of technical services.

Advocate Health Care, which provides medical care at 250 sites, including 10 acute-care hospitals and two integrated children's hospitals, initially deployed 802.11 a/g/n access points throughout its facilities and untethered a host of traditionally wired devices such as floor workstations. Over time, though, the IT team observed interference among the growing access point clusters and wireless access bottlenecks became a concern.

"There has been an exponential growth in the use of wireless in healthcare overall -- everything is wireless whether it needs to be or not," Horn says. "Yet we haven't cracked the wireless bandwidth nut -- rarely do you attain the speed and performance users need, even if they are close to the access point."

Eric Hanselman, an analyst at 451 Research, agrees. Users expect the same computing experience they get at home, he says. Yet as data goes mobile and heads out to the cloud, that response time may slow down.