The ability to roam around an office while continuously connected to a wireless LAN will be extended across whole buildings and campuses with a set of products Nortel Networks announced Monday.
Their network switch can handle as many as 500 secure wireless LAN connections across multiple access points. The platform will be at the heart of a broad set of wireless LAN offerings called the Nortel Networks WLAN 2200 line, designed for carrier hotspot deployments as well as enterprises.
The switch can carry 200M bps (bits per second) of encrypted traffic and can handle 500 users at a time. For more users, enterprises can set up multiple 2250 switches, and those switches can balance the load among them. It can be used with any vendor’s standard wireless LAN. It will ship June 30 with a list price between US$6,000 and $7,000.
The company’s Access Point 2220 is a dual-band device that also can be upgraded to the upcoming 802.11g standard. It can also be equipped with dual software images, one active and one for backup, so technicians don’t have to rush out to restart a failed access point. The access point will ship May 30 for a list price of $899 and a dual-band client card, that fits into a CardBus slot, will be priced at $259.
A software client, the WLAN - Mobile Voice Client i2050, can be loaded on PCs or PDAs (personal digital assistants) equipped with telephony components and make them work as IP phones. This lets enterprises give each employee a single extension that travels around the site and lets them bypass cell phone service costs. It will cost about $100.
Nortel, like virtually every other large telecommunications firm, understands the obvious; wires are dying. Desktop computers are moving to laptops and laptops will have Wi-Fi built-in. Cell phones will have PDA functionality and Wi-Fi, too.
About 19% of laptop computers sold last year came with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities, a number expected to grow to 91% by 2005, according to market-research firm International Data Corp.
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