Nortel plans to deliver its own set of 802.11n wireless LAN products later in 2008, as part of a strategy to package a range of data and voice products to create wholly wireless office environments.

The company claimed it would pump a “significant increase” into R&D to design and build new multi-radio access points, and a new line of WLAN switches, though it did not specify how much new investment it would make. At the same time, Nortel said it will create integrated Ethernet switches to replace its dedicated wireless switches with a switch family that can handle both wired and wireless client traffic.

The decision is a blow to Trapeze Networks, which has been Nortel’s wireless equipment supplier for several years. Nortel rebrands the Trapeze access points and switches, which enterprise customers deploy as an overlay network, with its own infrastructure, security and management separate from the wired network. Nortel said it will continue to OEM the Trapeze product until Nortel’s products are available.

Nortel’s new wireless products won’t begin to appear until the latter half of 2008, the timing and the technologies make sense, says Chris Silva, analyst for enterprise wireless, Forrester Research. The draft IEEE 802.11n standard, which promises WLAN performance of 100M to 200Mbps initially, is going to level the WLAN playing field all over again, he says. Vendors will soon start delivering enterprise wireless gear based on draft 2 of the 802.11n standard, with the market for current gear shriveling in proportion.

“No one has a lock on the 11n market at this point,” Silva says.

That being the case, Nortel’s decision to take control of its WLAN future makes “good strategic sense,” he says. “Nortel was buying someone else’s technology and had no control over that development.”

Currently, Nortel offers the 2300 series of WLAN access points and controllers from Trapeze, it’s own outdoor WLAN mesh nodes, and both fixed and mobile WiMAX radios, targeted at backhaul and longer-range mobile networking.

Nortel will design and introduce a multi-radio 802.11a/b/g/n access point, and the accompanying controllers, says Kyle Klassen, director of enterprise wireless marketing, for Nortel’s enterprise converged data networking group.

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