“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!” Yes, those were the words used by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, talking about civil rights in the United States. Similar sentiments were used years later when innovators in IT came up with reliable wireless connections between enterprise and user-based computers that enabled people to roam at will without wires and plugs and still get work done and information exchanged. Since mobile phones became mainstream in the 1990s, we’ve come a long, long way in terms of IT wireless connectivity. You may not have noticed it in its entirety, but in 2016, the industry witnessed more than a simple incremental bump up in wireless capability and user-friendliness; this is due to vastly improved system architectures and software. In this eWEEK slide show, we identify 11 advances in wireless connectivity made during the past year, using industry information from Mist Systems, whose software provides machine learning and automation for simplifying IT operations.
