Interop in Las Vegas two weeks ago featured the usual litany of big vendors, but it's fun to nose around to see what the smaller shops have cooked up.

One relative newcomer with a big presence was Xirrus, a Wi-Fi hardware company that has been selling products for a year and landed the job of providing wireless access for the show floor. That mapped neatly to Xirrus' strength, which is high-performance, high-capacity Wi-Fi. The company offers saucer-shaped access points that contain four, eight or 16 802.11 a/b/g radios.

The FCC regulates the power of Wi-Fi radios, so Xirrus gets greater capacity by using directional arrays to create sectors in a given space, just as the cell phone industry does. The result is two times the range and effectively four times the coverage of conventional Wi-Fi, says Alan Amrod, Xirrus' vice president of sales and marketing.

Xirrus does all the media access control (MAC) layer integration, coordination and synchronization, and the arrays sense each other and auto adjust so the radios don't step on each other, Amrod says.

The company installed 11 arrays at the conference, each of which has 864Mbps of capacity, to support an expected 3,000 to 4,000 concurrent users. Access points cost $750 per radio.