The article that Steven D. Baker and I wrote for IEEE Titled “Medical Grade Mission Critical Wireless Networks” covers a lot ground. However, I did want to touch on one area. Back in the 80’s (dates me), when it was still the days of VHF and UHF (yes even go back to analog and the transition to digital and non-fade oscilloscopes), hospitals rarely had over a 100 channels. Now the game is to provide ambulatory (telemetry), patient monitoring house wide, especially with the innovations in displays, battery life, and better overall system designs. This means often large institutions may want over 240 channels. Telemetry with these innovations is often the monitor of choice. The issue is with WMTS at 608-614MHz, you have 6MHz of bandwidth. Since the modulation is GMSK (Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying), the channel spacing is 25KHz. So doing the math, 25KHz into 6MHz, gives you 240, that is without any guard bands. As described in this paper “However the widest band in the WMTS spans only 6MHz. As a result, spread spectrum systems that use this band render useless nearby second-generation systems that are transmitting in the 608-614MHz band. Other companies use the 1.4GHz WMTS bands but they suffer from a small BW (one with a 5-MHz BW, another with a 3-MHz BW,) and a prohibition of all but medical telemetry data.” Large hospitals, especially those in dense metropolitan areas continue to struggle with limitations of their WMTS systems due to restricted BW. This is further complicated by documented cases where WMTS bandwidth had to be further restricted in some cases to only 2.5MHz, or where legal broadcast stations have cause interference, there again, causing restrictions on the bandwidth. Having less than 120 (25KHz into 120) usable telemetry channels simply is not adequate for a lot of large integrated house-wide telemetry deployments. The M300 (Telemetry) from Draeger Medical since it uses 802.11b/g network components changes the game. The M300 is intended to support up to 999 beds (channels) in a single network. All the more reason for standards based networking technologies leaving WMTS in the dust.