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September 27, 2002

News for 9/27/2002

By Glenn Fleishman

Today’s 802.11b Networking News is sponsored by FatPort’s access point for the rest of us — FatPoint

Today’s news is also sponsored by Vernier Networks, enabling companies to rapidly deploy and operate secure, scalable, and mission-critical 802.11 wireless networks.

The above are paid, sponsored links. Contact us for more information.

Managing large WLANs may turn from aggregation into peer to peer networks and other options: My article in next week’s InfoWorld magazine, addresses the current state and future of enterprise-scale WLAN management, when you’re handling hundreds to thousands of access points across buildings or even continents. The current technology is quite good for what it does — I didn’t get a chance to address much of that, as this was a future-gazing piece. One network admin at a college in New York described deploying over 200 802.11a access points: it took him just four hours to configure all of them using the Harmony AP Controller from Proxim.

My article is part of a package of features on WLANs, covering issues of the state of standards, some practical examples, and insight into Bluesocket’s approach to inside-the-network-style management of authentication. There’s also a nice chunk on roaming: dealing with cross-subnet computer motion, and creating virtual IP addresses to cope with it.

Toshiba ships cable modem/Wi-Fi/Ethernet combo: The device is an Ethernet hub, a wireless access point, and a cable modem. It meets a standard for cable modems, but I’m not clear whether you could buy this and swap it in, which the article seems to imply. More likely, cable data services will adopt this device.

Proxim to sell long-range Wi-Fi gear: The article doesn’t nail down exactly what the crux is, but Proxim appears to be entering the long-range wISP market for fixed point-to-point wireless with a line of equipment that will cost $2,000 to $6,000 per installation. It’s unclear how many customers you hang off that and what the customer-premises equipment will cost.

Wireless around the world: I’m collecting the terms of wireless in various languages. In German, drahtlos; in Danish, the similar sounding trådløs. Dutch: also similar, draadloos. In Estonian, traadita. Several Francophones noted that the French phrase is sans fil. In Italian, senza fili. More, please!

Posted by Glennf at September 27, 2002 9:11 AM

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