HP's intent to acquire wireless LAN company Colubris is one in a series of industry-consolidation moves. So who's next? No one, if the remaining startups have their say.
Last week's announcement that HP intends to acquire wireless LAN company Colubris Networks gives HP a chance to become a formidable player in the enterprise WLAN market. HP has long offered its own ProCurve WLAN products integrated with its popular ProCurve Ethernet switches - a conceptually a nice idea but also a somewhat limiting one.
The global voice and data roaming charges users incur when they travel internationally have long been a thorn in the side of multinational companies. Usage for data is particularly difficult to control for several reasons, one of which is that some of the usage gets sucked up by background housekeeping duties - such as regular automatic checks to weather, e-mail and other services. Even if there's no new data downloaded, these pings eat up some portion of the allotted kilobytes.
I was talking to a telecom manager of a large U.S.-based multinational company recently who lamented the fact that worldwide data roaming charges are too steep and unpredictable to justify his business using the multimedia-centric iPhone as an enterprise device. Executives in his organization recently took some complimentary iPhone 3Gs overseas and returned to discover data-usage bills of $4,000 to $5,000 apiece. According to the telecom manager: "They had a cow!"
How do single-mode femtocell-based services, such as the forthcoming Airave service from Sprint, stack up against fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) offerings?
Sprint says it will make available mid-month a nationwide femtocell-based service that allows you to buy and install a small $100 CDMA amplifier to boost signals in Sprint's licensed spectrum across about 5,000 square feet of space in your home or office. OK, addressing poor in-building coverage with a simple and relatively inexpensive device is admirable. But there are some outstanding questions about usage, frequency coordination, pricing and other issues.
Philadelphia's Drexel University is busy installing a thousand Draft 2.0 802.11n access points, a huge network project boasting a curious history and a cutthroat vendor evaluation process.
Have you considered wrapping your building in tinfoil or slathering the walls with metal-impregnated paint to keep RF signals from leaking out? If so, you might want to hold off till September, when a simpler alternative is expected to arrive.
Dynamic frequency selection, or DFS, is moving onto WLAN users' radars (pun intended) as 802.11n materializes and promises to greatly increase Wi-Fi usage in the 5GHz band. The DFS channel-changing capability applies, from a U.S. regulatory standpoint, to particular 5GHz bands used occasionally by military and weather radar that have also been sanctioned by the FCC to accommodate Wi-Fi traffic when radar data isn't present. What does this mean from an implementation and performance perspective?
The latest 802.11n topic to get its knickers in a twist revolves around a capability called dynamic frequency selection, or DFS. There are general performance issues associated with DFS as well as separate U.S. FCC regulatory compliance requirements to consider.
Along with the potential performance and coverage benefits of 802.11n come a few new security risks, says industry security guru Joshua Wright. Wright presented a Webinar last week that outlined several new vulnerabilities that high-speed 802.11n networks introduce.
Intel intends to ship its long-anticipated Centrino 2 mobile laptop platform this week. The platform will include enhanced Wi-Fi capabilities, but its dual-mode Wi-Fi 11n/WiMAX module (codenamed "Echo Peak") won't ship until "later this year," says an Intel spokeswoman.
A chain of independent 7-Eleven convenience stores in central Oklahoma has completed a highly distributed Wi-Fi rollout to support a new inventory management system. Starting the wireless project from scratch has allowed the company to fully embrace wireless Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) mandates.
It's still a long way to Tipperary, but the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun early certification testing for voice interoperability and - for the first time - performance.
In putting together an evaluation of 802.11n vendor strengths and weaknesses, ABI Research, which issued its 802.11n Vendor Matrix last week, has created a template you can use as a cheat sheet for your own assessments.
A recent, multidimensional evaluation of 802.11n wireless LAN vendors compiled by ABI Research reflects the complexity facing IT departments as they conduct their own assessments of enterprise-class 802.11n prospects. In what was more or less a photo finish, Meru Networks edged out its fierce rival, Aruba Networks, as the leading vendor in ABI's latest Vendor Matrix, released last week. Motorola took the No. 3 spot.
Several wireless technologies are contending to become the next-generation transport system for mobile video and collaborative business applications and services. The frontrunners in the WAN are WiMAX and Long-Term Evolution (LTE).
Lately, the spotlight has swung toward Long-Term Evolution (LTE), the so-called fourth-generation mobile broadband technology descended from GSM cellular protocols. CDMA veteran Verizon Wireless, for example, has switched to LTE as its future mobile service delivery platform. GSM-based AT&T is, unsurprisingly headed that way, too. And recently, mobile base station maker Nortel dumped its WiMAX product development in deference to LTE.
A confused reader has been pressing for details about the Anthony Marano fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) installation I described last week. In trying to cram the many dimensions of a complex situation into a couple of short newsletters, I fear I might have lost you, too. So let me attempt to clear up questions about the company's dual-pronged FMC approach by telling what I've told "Lane" on the Network World Wireless and Mobility community site.
The hybrid approach to fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) that produce wholesaler Anthony Marano has taken involves a few interesting configuration twists.
Chicago fruits and vegetables distributor Anthony Marano Company has settled on a hybrid fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) configuration to meet its intensive wireless voice and inter-network roaming requirements. It has installed a CPE-based solution and also subscribes to a carrier FMC service to get the job done.
For at least a decade, while vendors such as Cisco pressured enterprises to collapse their separate voice and data networks into a common IP infrastructure, the term "convergence" has often been used synonymously (and somewhat carelessly) with VoIP. In many circles, it still carries that meaning.
Meru Networks plans to ship beta software next month that lets its year-old 802.11n wireless LAN gear support the company's heralded Virtual Cell technology. That might sound anticlimactic to those who assumed that Virtual Cell was already a fait accompli in all Meru equipment, including its Draft 2.0 802.11n-compatible AP300 product family.
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