WLANs for SME: Bandspeed's Back

That's a little misleading, perhaps, since Bandspeed never went away. But this is a company that has changed direction significantly and may now in fact be on a very profitable course indeed.

I first heard spoke with Bandspeed back in 2003 when they were selling a spatial-division multiple-access (SDMA) antenna and related hardware for WLAN applications. This was essentially a sectorized antenna that in theory, anyway, could have done for Wi-Fi what sectorized antennas do in cellular and other outdoor systems - multiply effective bandwidth through frequency reuse over space. Note that this is not MIMO, but rather another clever technique entirely. I thought Bandspeed had a very interesting approach, although I was concerned that the benefits might be mitigated in indoor applications by multipath. If you want to see what Bandspeed was up to back then, have a look at one of their old Web pages courtesy of the amazing Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. And let this be a lesson to you: never put anything on the Web that you don't want the whole world to be able to see forever.

Anyway, fast forward to now, and the company has an entirely new direction - WLAN systems aimed at the small/medium enterprise/business (SME/SMB) market. To date, this opportunity has been woefully underserved by most WLAN system vendors, with smaller enterprises having to choose between whatever's on the shelves at the big-box consumer electronics store down the street, or enterprise-class systems that require far too steep a learning curve, to say nothing of budget, than most smaller businesses can devote to going wireless.

Bandspeed's "virtual" controller-based AirMaestro solution includes a number of novel features. First of all, Bandspeed's work with the SDMA system gave them a good deal of experience in building medium-access control (MAC) subsystems for WLANs, and they include MAC-based spectral analysis in the product. Note this is not based on Cognio's (now Cisco's) technology, but it does the same thing, allowing interference to be analyzed and (eventually, anyway) used as an element in spectrum management decisions. The Bandspeed AP includes three a/b/g radios, reminiscent of Engim's (RIP) three-radio chipsets. Love that Wayback machine. Both monitoring and management software are available; there's no mesh functionality yet but such would be terrific with three radios per AP.

But what's really amazing is the pricing - APs are $599, and the management software is $499. I've not yet tried these products, but I'm very interested in this space because I see growth here are being simply outstanding over the next few years. Wi-Fi will become the default access is smaller enterprises, too, and there are a whole lot of them worldwide. But Bandspeed by no means has the whole opportunity to themselves; 3Com, Aerohive, D-Link (which is based on technology from Trapeze Networks), Linksys, Netgear, Proxim, and Ruckus Wireless, among others, have products here. Perhaps a comparative test is in order... Stay tuned.