Wireless vendors target high-bandwidth gear

Wireless offerings set to debut at Interop are targeting corporate customers looking to add high-bandwidth gear to core networks.

Bluesocket is scheduled to introduce the first multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-based wireless LAN (WLAN) access point for corporations. Meru Networks is expected to unveil products that let customers connect a WLAN infrastructure wirelessly to a network core. Foundry is scheduled to announce WLAN switches designed for future high-bandwidth 802.11n networks.

MIMO is a technique that boosts WLAN throughput from the 20M-to-25Mbps range in today's 802.11a and 11g networks to more than 100Mbps when MIMO radios are on both sides of a connection. It's the heart of the IEEE 802.11n standard now in development. Airgo Networks introduced the first MIMO chipset in 2004, and the third-generation chip is widely used in access points aimed at the small office/home office and residential markets.

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Wireless offerings set to debut at Interop are targeting corporate customers looking to add high-bandwidth gear to core networks.

Bluesocket is scheduled to introduce the first multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-based wireless LAN (WLAN) access point for corporations. Meru Networks is expected to unveil products that let customers connect a WLAN infrastructure wirelessly to a network core. Foundry is scheduled to announce WLAN switches designed for future high-bandwidth 802.11n networks.

MIMO is a technique that boosts WLAN throughput from the 20M-to-25Mbps range in today's 802.11a and 11g networks to more than 100Mbps when MIMO radios are on both sides of a connection. It's the heart of the IEEE 802.11n standard now in development. Airgo Networks introduced the first MIMO chipset in 2004, and the third-generation chip is widely used in access points aimed at the small office/home office and residential markets.

Bluesocket is one of the first vendors to build a MIMO product for enterprises, the BlueSecure Access Point 1700. The Airgo chipset is Wi-Fi certified, and existing 802.11b and 11g clients can connect to the 1700 point without any changes. But the MIMO technology is designed to improve range and throughput even for these clients.

That's what attracts some users, such as a systems engineer with a leading office supply company.

"The amount of access points you have to install in a six-story, two-tower facility can get quite large," he says, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Something like this will help out tremendously in terms of [reducing] the amount of access points and [increasing] the coverage."

Click to see: Bluesocket's MIMO 802.11b/g access point

The 1700 access point is scheduled to be available at the end of July, priced at $795, compared with $395 for the vendor's existing 1500 point.

Meru Networks has written code for its access points and controllers to support backbone connectivity. The Meru Wireless Backbone System wirelessly connects access points to Meru Radio Switches in wiring closets, or interconnects the switches. The switches have four, eight or 12 radios, and Meru's software aligns the channels between them to aggregate bandwidth.

One Meru customer who likes this idea is Ken Winke, whose title is "convergineer" for Optimus, a Chicago company that does postproduction work for TV commercials. "We could tie together three 11a channels and have this big, full-duplex pipe [between switches]," he says. "That's really cool."

Meru's software is being put into new products, such as the AP150-WB, priced at $995, and the RS4000-WB switch, priced at $2,995. Software upgrades for existing products are available, at $595 for a single AP208, and $1,595 for the RS4000 switch. The products are scheduled to ship in July.

Anticipating future 802.11n-based access points, Foundry plans to launch two WLAN switches with Gigabit Ethernet and Power over Ethernet (PoE) ports to deliver AC power to access points. The switches can aggregate multiple 100-plus-Mbps connections from an access point on one wire.