Enterasys Networks, in association with its South African alliance partner, Duxbury Networking, has unveiled the networking industry`s first wireless access platform to offer 54Mbps performance.
It is designed to enable high-bandwidth applications, such as live video, voice and multimedia, over wireless networks.
Martin May, regional director of Enterasys Networks SA, says the new platform - dubbed the RoamAbout R2 - is capable of exceeding the speed of most wired networks and opens wireless technology to a new world of applications that were previously associated with high-speed wired infrastructures.
"The development represents a new era in wireless LANs," he says. "It is the industry`s first wireless LAN platform to deliver policy-based, user personalised networking.
Performance benchmark
The 54Mbps performance benchmark of the R2 is said to offer a significant increase from the current 11Mbps IEEE 802.11b wireless standard, without forcing customers through a full-scale upgrade of their existing 11Mbps products, as the R2 will support both 11Mbps and 54Mbps users simultaneously from one device.
"This design provides users with investment protection in current 11Mbps technology and an easy migration to higher speed wireless LANs," says May.
He says the R2 combines the mobility of wireless with the performance of wired networks and a full set of "wired-like" features for security, management and policy enforcement.
"This is significant for command and control of wireless LAN traffic as more advanced applications move to wireless networks. This means that large companies, schools, government agencies and other organisations can deliver high-end applications via wireless networks."
Features
The R2`s advanced features bring "wired like" Layer 3-4 capabilities to wireless LANs, delivering multi-layer quality of service (QoS) to prioritise network traffic across wireless or hybrid wired/wireless enterprise networks.
In addition, R2 also offers the RoamAbout family`s remote power feature, which reduces customer costs by eliminating the need to wire electricity to each access point. The R2 also offers a 10/100 Fast Ethernet uplink for connectivity to wired networks, a significant improvement from previous 10Mbps uplinks.
The R2 provides expanded point-to-multipoint wireless capabilities. This allows 1-to-100 point to multipoint wireless connections between access points to create multiple wireless "paths" throughout a network or among buildings in a campus environment, yielding increased redundancy for high availability wireless networks.
This feature offers great benefits for environments such as college campuses or industrial parks that are looking to do "one to many" outdoor wireless connectivity between buildings.
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