WORCESTER, MASS. – Cisco’s pending acquisition target, Airespace, has begun beta-testing two products, an outdoor wireless mesh node, and a high-end wireless LAN switch, according to several customers (see our Technology Insider ).
The mesh node will be Airespace’s first in this increasingly crowded market segment.
In a mesh, wireless clients are routed through nodes that are themselves wirelessly linked to a gateway that connects with a wired network. The mesh extends a WLAN over larger areas, minimizes Ethernet cabling and provides redundant pathways for WLAN traffic.
The new WLAN switch will support a larger number of access points than the Airespace 4000 model or the company’s 4100 data center appliance, customers say.
Customers refer to Airespace’s mesh node as the 1300 and the new switch as the 4200. It’s unclear whether Airespace plans to ship the products before the acquisition deal is completed by the end of April.
An Airespace executive says the company does not comment on unannounced products.
The new products already were nearing completion when Cisco announced in January that it planned to buy the privately held company for $450 million. Cisco hasn’t yet said what its WLAN product strategy will be in the wake of the acquisition.
Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, has begun beta-testing the first of about a half-dozen outdoor Airespace nodes. These will extend the campus WLAN, based on Cisco’s Aironet access points, into open areas off campus, according to college IT managers. Some details of the outdoor product were unveiled publicly at a higher-education technical conference last week, in a presentation college officials said had been cleared by the vendor.
The 1300 outdoor node is easy to mount on a light pole and plug into a streetlight’s power supply, says Michael King, technical support specialist with the college’s Office of Telecommunications. It takes about the same amount of power as a lightbulb, he says.
The node has two radios: the 2.4-GHz unit connects with standard 802.11b and 802.11g client devices; the 5.8-GHz has a modified version of the 802.11a WLAN specification. The changes let Airespace run it at up to 500 milliwatts, far above a typical office or home access point’s power level in the 30 to 50 milliwatt range. The 2.4-GHz radio can reach up to 250 milliwatts.
With such power, WLAN ranges for outdoor networks can span thousands of feet, compared with a few hundred or less for indoor WLANs at conventional power levels. Higher power also lets the WLAN cut through interference. Bridgewater has not tested either capability.
Airespace seems to have maintained relatively high performance levels even after traffic makes multiple hops through the mesh, King says. Each hop reduces the overall throughput. But he says even after hopping to a fifth node, users will have about 3.5M byte/sec of shared throughput. In a typical indoor 11a or 11g network, optimal throughput is in the 20M to 23M-byte/sec range but drops off sharply as the distance between client and access point increases.
Bridgewater eventually will have about seven or eight outdoor nodes, with one of them wired back into the campus network. WLAN users within range of a node will have authenticated access via 802.1x to the campus network.
Some rivals, such as BelAir and Tropos, are specializing in outdoor WLAN meshes. Others, including Firetide, Meru Networks and Nortel, offer outdoor products that can be used solely in outdoor networks or to extend indoor WLANs over outdoor areas.
Few details were disclosed about the new Airespace switch. The current 4000 models connect directly with 12 or 24 Airespace or third-party access points. The 4100 sits between a wiring closet switch and the network core. In this configuration, the access points are wired to the existing Ethernet switch.
“We already have a 4200 series switch and so far it’s been working like a champ,” says Michael Sherwood, CIO for the city of Oceanside, Calif.
“The 420x [series] allows for space conservation within our data center, as it handles more access points than the previous solution in the same rack space,” says Mark Rein, director of IT at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington. Both men declined to be more specific about the new switch’s features.
The higher density might be important because some rivals claim to support several hundred access points on one switch.
The future of these and other Airespace products hinges on how Cisco decides to juggle the two WLAN product lines. One option is for Cisco to support the existing Airespace products for some time, while cannibalizing the Airespace software for its own WLAN approach, beefing up the ability of IOS-based switches and routers to manage and secure enterprise WLANs.
Cisco offers the Aironet line of conventional access points and the Wireless LAN Solutions Engine to manage them. Last year, as part of its response to the challenge posed by Airespace and other WLAN switch vendors, Cisco introduced its Wireless LAN Services Module, a blade that slots into its high-end Catalyst 6500s switch and manages WLAN traffic.
