Results of a survey by Harris Interactive, commissioned by Nextel, found that the top four reasons expressed by the national sampling of 76 manufacturing executives for adoption of wireless technology, are use as cellular calling for executives and sales staffs (100%); barcode scanning (78%); BlackBerry devices (68%); and push-to-talk service (59%).
As might be expected, the survey found that planned expansions of bar coding and deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) was a top reason for securing wireless technology in manufacturing. Too, 72% of those surveyed indicated that they saw a need for a combination of cellular and WiFi capabilities.
When selecting a wireless provider, those in manufacturing looked for geographic coverage (55%), more than data network speed (18%) and price (17%).
