Cisco unveils 802.11n wireless LAN access point for enterprises

Cisco Tuesday jumped into the IEEE 802.11n wireless LAN market with a two-radio access point based on the draft standard and aimed squarely at its huge enterprise customer base.

Smaller WLAN rivals such as Meru previously had announced draft 11n products. But Cisco’s introduction almost instantly legitimizes these not-officially-standard products, which will form the core of next generation WLANs.

Duke University has already deployed eight of the new Cisco Aironet 1250 access points in one campus dormitory for evaluation. About 50 students live in the building. Each access point has a gigabit Ethernet link to one of two Cisco switches, which interconnect through a router with a dedicated Cisco WLAN controller in the building.

Click to see: Cisco joins the stampede for draft 802.11n WLAN products with the 600Mbps Aironet 1250 access point, with two 11n radios, one in the 2.4GHz band, the other in 5GHz.

Duke network staff have seen up to about 30 simultaneous clients attaching to the 11n WLAN, most of them using 11b/g or 11a, but some using brand new 11n interfaces for example in a USB dongle.

The 11n infrastructure could be a major step forward not just in performance but in wireless reliability and consistency, according to Kevin Miller, assistant director of communications infrastructure with Duke’s Office of Information Technology. “For a long time, we and others have viewed a wireless LAN as a secondary network,” he says. But in the past year, people have started to treat the wireless net as their primary connectivity mode. “So we are very interested in evaluating the reliability as much as the bandwidth [in 11n] that could help us realize the goal of a wireless net that is more comparable to a wired net,” Miller says. “Could that become a reality? We don’t know yet.”

A New York state college is thinking along the same lines, and is already deploying the first 11n equipment from Meru. Recent studies show intense interest in 11n among network professionals.

As part of the 11n announcement, Cisco also says it is upgrading the Wireless Service Module (WiSM), which is the WLAN blade for the Catalyst 6500. The new version of this “WLAN controller-on-a-board” will support 48Gbps, up from 40Gbps, to handle the much higher throughput from the 11n access points. The Cisco Secure Services Client 5.0 software makes it simpler to provision a security and management framework for wireless clients and has a simpler, redesigned user interface.

These are critical parts of Cisco’s effort to create a unified wired/wireless strategy, and rightly so, says analyst Craig Mathias, principal of Farpoint Group, a wireless consulting firm in Ashland, Mass. “11n isn't going to be the battleground - it will be part of the [minimal] ‘jacks-or-better’ to get into the game,” he says. “Rather, the differentiators [among vendors] will be in the value of the different architectural approaches used (and we continue to see broad diversity here) as well as the management capabilities of each, and especially in how well vendors support unified wired/wireless configurations.”

The Aironet1250 model has two 11n radios, with chipsets that can also run as 11b/g or 11a radios to support existing WLAN clients. One radio runs in the 2.4-GHz band, the second in the 5-GHz band. Cisco executives wouldn’t say whose silicon they’re using. The 11n standard allows the use of 40-MHz channels, double the width of existing WLAN nets. If both Cisco radios use these wider channels and run at the same time, the maximum data rate for the 1250 is just under 600Mbps (270Mbps for the 2.4-GHz radio, and 300Mbps for the 5-GHz radio), according to Cisco.