Cisco's recent purchase of Airespace could kick-start the wireless LAN market, creating new options for enterprise customers, particularly Cisco shops that were reluctant to pay a premium for Cisco gear, but which were also skittish about going with a WLAN switch start-up.

Cisco initially will offer Airespace WLAN switches and thin access points under the Cisco name alongside Cisco's Aironet fat access points, which are part of its Structured Wireless-Aware Network (SWAN) product line.

The Airespace WLAN switch offers superb security and management features at a much lower total cost of ownership than an Aironet rollout. As a result, it's likely that many customers that shied away from Cisco's higher-priced offerings will move forward with the Cisco-Airespace product.

Cisco plans to integrate Airespace switches with SWAN, but there is no clear definition of how Cisco will make this integration work. It's likely Cisco will interface Aironet access points to Airespace WLAN switches. This will let Cisco customers with Aironet access points migrate to a wireless switched network.

Cisco's purchase of Airespace is seen as validation of the thin access point approach to WLANs, an approach taken by the start-ups such as Trapeze Networks, Aruba Wireless Networks and Airespace. Cisco followed the more traditional approach of deploying fat access points and connecting to current Ethernet switches. In Cisco's case, the company created a WLAN blade for the Catalyst 6500 switch.

A switch in time

Cisco's move also reflects an acknowledgement that the future belongs to the Airespace model. According to Infonetics, Cisco is No. 1 in WLAN revenue, with 17% market share, followed by Linksys (owned by Cisco), D-Link Systems and Netgear. But Infonetics reports that fierce price pressure is severely impacting revenue - in 2004 worldwide units sold increased 51% but revenue only increased 15%.

Synergy Research predicts that worldwide revenue from traditional access points will drop 2% in 2005, 35% in 2006 and 11% in 2007. On the other hand, sales of WLAN switches will grow 150% in 2005, 53% in 2006 and 59% in 2007, according to Synergy.

In the fat access point scenario, access points such as Cisco's Aironet provide radio-based connections in addition to security, management and performance enhancements. The advantage is that you easily can make use of your Ethernet infrastructure, but the downsides are that the access points are relatively expensive and difficult to manage.