Wireless LAN switch feast

The CEOs and founders of five wireless LAN switch start-ups broke bread with Network World editors at Rosemary's Restaurant during NetWorld+Interop, Las Vegas. The idea was that between bites of Ahi tuna and goat cheese hazelnut cheesecake we would chew on the issues of enterprise WLANs and this new class of product called wireless switches.

Not surprisingly, all of the executives - from Airespace, AirFlow Networks, Aruba Wireless Networks, Trapeze Networks and Vivato - are convinced that WLANs are poised to create a huge new market, with plenty of room at the table for ambitious new entrants, namely themselves.

The Wi-Fi wireless Ethernet movement in some ways looks like the early days of the first Web browser, Mosaic, said Airespace CEO Brett Galloway, who earlier in his career served as director of engineering for wireless pioneer Metricom. People are getting their hands on Wi-Fi, finding it easy to use, and building applications for it that are attracting more devices, he said.

"You put that kind of market-adoption cycle together with the enormous untapped power of Wi-Fi . . . at some point, it's an unstoppable force," he said.

But all five agreed that unstoppable force is being restrained by the current architecture of Wi-Fi: individual access points connecting wirelessly to client devices and by cable to wiring closet switches.

"Think about access points," said Robert Machlin, CEO of AirFlow Networks and a veteran of network companies such as Ascend and Cascade. "They were built for [public-access] hot spots and the small office/home office market. But if you want to go to an enterprise deployment, where you use more than one access point, then how are you going to tie these together from a management viewpoint? What we're saying around this table is there's a systems approach to this problem."

That approach features a box, with Layer 2 and sometimes Layer 3 switching features, that plugs smoothly into existing wired networks. But it also has a wealth of added software to identify, track, secure and manage users logging in through a Wi-Fi radio connection. All five companies offer this basic solution, although one of them, Vivato, uses phased-array antennas to form and direct Wi-Fi beams at specific client devices.

Although conceptually simple, these boxes will lead to some big changes in enterprise networks, the CEOs agreed. "We call it 'wireless LAN switching' mostly because it is an add-on to the existing LANs, at some level," says Keerti Melkote, co-founder of Aruba Wireless Networks.

"But we're radically changing what a LAN switch is, by radically changing what a wired LAN switch understands as a user," he said.

In traditional networks, switches don't need to know who a user is, because the cable that connects the switch to a PC anchored on a desk, and uniquely identified with a media access control or IP address, assumes that the PC user is the correct user.

"With wireless, you need to know who that guy really is before you let him onto the network," said Melkote, a one-time member of Intel's IT staff. "And that fundamental departure leads to a lot of different capabilities that you need to integrate into the switch."

"A good term for that is a 'user-aware network' instead of a 'device-aware network,'" Machlin said. "Take [established equipment makers such as] Extreme, Foundry and Cisco, do they just add support for wireless users [to their boxes]? And is that good enough?"

"If you look at a traditional wired switch, it actually doesn't do very much," Airespace's Galloway said. "The curious thing about wireless is that it's mobile. There are huge security issues as a result. You have to create a whole security framework that's a lot harder to do than what you have in an Ethernet switch. And you have the wireless [radio] medium itself, which doesn't operate by itself [as Ethernet does]."