Yet another start-up in wireless LAN switches this week introduces what executives say is the most boring wireless switch on the market.

This unique approach by Legra Systems was distilled during an interview with a network executive who interrupted a presentation by Paul DeBeasi, Legra's vice president of product management and marketing. "He said, 'Look. All this is fine, well and good. But the bottom line is, I want these systems to be boring. Just like my wired network,'" DeBeasi recalls.

That's what Legra, in Burlington, Mass., plans to do with its switch, radio access points, and network management application. The company's products will ship in late summer. Pricing has not been finalized. DeBeasi would only say that based on prices announced by numerous rivals, Legra's pricetags will be "highly competitive."

Like those rivals, Legra's products are a stripped down 802.11 radio, sometimes called a thin or dumb access point, and a box that plugs somewhere into the existing enterprise net. The box typically handles Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching features. That means it can act as a switch to packets based on IP address, give priority to certain classes of traffic, and so on.

Legra's switch includes its own extensible "wireless operating system," which is a set of software features built atop an embedded Linux kernel. This software lets the switches communicate with each other to do load balancing, to hand off mobile users from one access point or switch to another, and to work with upstream routers.

The switch is a rackmounted box with four processors: one each for the Legra operating system, for handling Layer 2 and 3 functions, for identifying and assigning cryptographic keys for each packet entering and leaving the box, and for doing the encrypt/decrypt work.

The Linux kernel and the Legra operating system let the switch run Linux applications. The design lets Legra and third-party application vendors use a set of open APIs to load applications on the switch. The processing architeture gives the box the horesepower to run them. Legra has been talking with software vendors such as AirMagnet and Newbury Networks, which write applications for administering wireless LANs, says Albert Lew, Legra's director of product management.