Three wireless LAN vendors are unveiling at Interop Las Vegas this week enterprise access points that will offer 100Mbps to 200Mbps throughput, shared among the Wi-Fi clients that connect to it.

All three, from Colubris, Ruckus, and Trapeze, are based on the IEEE 802.11n draft 2 standard.

Colubris, Waltham, Mass., plans to offer a two-radio access point, the Multiservice Access Point (MAP)-625. One radio is intended to support existing 802.11a, b, and g clients. The second radio, based on Atheros silicon, support the 11n draft 2 standard.

This approach lets enterprise users start adding 11n support into the WLAN infrastructure, which will still support existing wireless clients, until they, too, are outfitted with an 11n adapter, according to Carl Blume, Colubris’ director of strategic marketing.

And, with existing clients on a dedicated radio, they won’t throttle down the 11n connection. The 11n access point can detect, for example, an 11b client trying to connect with it, says Roger Sands, the company’s vice president of engineering. When it does, the 11n chipset will “jump down” to the 11Mbps data rate which is the maximum for an 11b. A further performance hit follows if that 11b client is also an active talker, says Sands. “He’s consuming more time on the access point, so more of the available [11n] bandwidth is being eaten up at the lower rate,” he says.

The MAP-625 11n radio will deliver useable throughput of 100Mbps minimum, says Sands, with the 11abg radio adding about another 24Mbps. It has one Gigabit Ethernet port, which means the MAP-625 will need to connect to a Gigabit port on the nearest LAN edge switch.

For enterprise nets with Gigabit edge switches, the impact of 11n will be minimal. But closer to the network core, as a growing amount of 11n traffic is aggregated, then some LAN switches may have to be upgraded.

But, according to Sands, the new access point will work with existing Colubris WLAN controllers, without requiring any software or hardware changes to these centralized boxes. That’s partly because the controllers were designed with enough capacity, processing power, and memory to handle 11n, and partly because the Colubris access points can switch WLAN packets on their own, without routing all data packets through the controller.

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