Westcon announces Cisco`s Aironet 350 series of wireless LAN products

Channel provider of networking technology products, Westcon, has announced that it is shipping Cisco`s Wireless LAN (WLAN) solution for enterprise, small and medium businesses.

The Cisco Aironet 350 Series Access Points, Bridges and Client Adapters deliver a performance opportunity for decreased total cost of ownership, security, and reliability. No other wireless LAN offering, claims Cisco, comes close to delivering all these benefits in one solution.

According to Gareth Thomas, Cisco Systems product manager at Westcon, benefits of the new WLAN solution include high performance, high power 100-mW radio architecture, increased receive sensitivity, advanced signal processing, filtering and power management capabilities that deliver industry-leading throughput, range and reliability.

"What will appeal to the market is an opportunity of decreased total cost of ownership, while support for in-line power over Ethernet adds to installation flexibility and reduces complexity. As a result users may find a decrease in the installation and operations costs," says Thomas.

Automatic channel selection, Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), DHCP and BootP services simplify installation and management of WLAN infrastructures.

In summarising the WLAN release, Kevin Mitchell, systems engineer at Cisco in SA says the WLAN infrastructure market is expected to double in each of the next two years.

He says the following features will create significant demand for the product:

• Security

  - IEEE 802.1x based Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) services providing user-level authentication as well as centralised single session, single user encryption key generation for enterprise scalability, hassle-free security administration and user-based privacy.

• Reliability

  - High availability services, such as load-balancing and hot-standby redundancy, delivering dependable performance and reliability.