November 3, 2003
Some of that cost is justified by employees' improved
productivity on the road. "I'm no longer a bottleneck [when
traveling]," Gillespie says. Mallick says he doesn't even set his
out-of-office message anymore for short trips. For well-paid
knowledge workers, the cost of wi-fi is even more readily
absorbed by the extra time they willingly spend on work at home.
Because wi-fi makes it so easy to jump on the corporate network
from your living room, more employees are working longer hours.
Mallick, for instance, says that since he got wi-fi installed at
home he works about 10 hours more every week—and that's down
from 15 when wi-fi first arrived. "I don't find it that
inconvenient to sit on my couch and pull out my laptop," he says.
That's good for work, but how good is it for his home life? "It
mostly comes down to willpower," Mallick says. "There are times
when I say, 'Ugh, why am I doing this?'" While iAnywhere hasn't
clipped its wires entirely, that may be an option for smaller
firms. Gartner's Fiering says she expects significant growth in
corporate wireless networks to come from small companies that use
wi-fi to avoid altogether the expensive investment in cabling.
That allows them to move offices quickly when they outgrow them
or when their rent goes up.
Perhaps the most intriguing promise of the wireless workplace is
that it could allow offices to be more like they used to be. All
that wiring has been shaping the way offices look—in some
buildings, for example, walls are built not to support the
structure but to carry cabling. Next year iAnywhere will move
into a brand-new space on the campus of the University of
Waterloo that has been conceived with wi-fi in mind. Patrick
Simmons, a partner in the firm designing the building, RHL
Architects, says wi-fi removes constraints that have become
second nature to architects. "You were kind of tethered to the
system," Simmons says. "[With wi-fi], you don't have to have
walls in a certain place, have dropped ceilings just to give you
access to cabling. You don't have to group people within certain
distances of server rooms."
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