Airespace, the wireless LAN switch platform developer, is launching a cross country road trip in its "magic bus" from which it is offering product demonstrations to potential customers and the press. Glenn Fleishman and I stopped by to see the "bus" (actually a well-affixed semi-trailer) in Bellevue, Wash., yesterday, equidistant from Boeing Field and Microsoft's headquarters.

While the WLAN switch market is crowded, Airespace says it has a couple of unique features that set it apart from the rest. Its strategies may be working as the company boasts 120 customers including Fidelity, Oracle, San Francisco's Moscone Center, and University of California at Berkeley. Also, Nortel, Alcatel, and NEC are selling self-branded switches from Airespace.

Airespace clinches some sales due to its support for voice over wireless LAN, said Jeff Aaron, a senior manager of product marketing for Airespace. The company works closely with Vocera, the maker of voice activated badges that workers use to talk to each other. We saw a brief demo of the Vocera devices, which had some difficulty understanding our voice commands with the background noise in the bus, but typically coped after one or two tries.

We were able to try out the location capability that the Airespace network enables on the Vocera badges. (Listen to MP3 audio of our test.) When users ask the badge to locate another user, the network uses triangulation plus additional software algorithms that compare the triangulation results with data about the potential interference caused by the shape of the building to determine where a user is. The results are accurate to three meters, which complies with E911 location requirements, Aaron said.

The Airespace platform is ideal for supporting voice, he said, because of the way calls are handed off between access points. Airespace licensed the code behind Atheros chips--which use flexible software-defined radio (SDR)--and altered it so that the chips splits the MAC layer between the access point and the backend switch. The access point handles association requests and the switch handles authentication and quality of service. That means handoff between access points as users move can happen in under 50 milliseconds, which is fast enough to support voice, Aaron said.

Airespace has an innovative approach to selling products to organizations that may not be ready yet to deploy a widescale wireless LAN. It now offers access points that operate just in what the company calls wireless prevention mode. Companies without wireless LANs can deploy a minimal number of access points just to ensure that employees aren't hanging unauthorized access points. Once the customer decides to build a wireless LAN, a software upgrade enables the access points to act as regular access points in a network and adds more as needed.

Airespace also sets itself apart from competitors by its rogue detection capabilities. Most wireless LAN developers offer some type of rogue detection but usually they accomplish it by switching the access points into scan mode to look for unauthorized access points. During that time, the access points aren't transmitting data for users. Airespace access points can listen and transmit at the same time. When the system locates a rogue, it marks it with a skull and crossbones icon on the customer management software tool, which depicts the layout of the building and shows the coverage area of all access points.

Airespace has a unique advantage in simultaneously monitoring and providing service in that they modified the baseband code in the Atheros chips to allow this function: the entire 2.4 GHz spectrum is analyzed and the currently assigned channel for that AP has its range sent on for signal processing. This is unique in our experience.

Aaron often compared Airespace's efforts with those from Trapeze Networks, another wireless LAN switch vendor that has also scored many customers. Trapeze is known for its Ringmaster software that makes network planning and deployment easy. The two companies seem to be making a buzz at CeBit in Germany. Airespace announced there that it is opening an office in Munich and that it supplied a network for Suffolk College in the U.K. Trapeze also recently introduced new software that allows customers more flexibility in where they can locate switches and access points.

But while Aaron seemed to admire Trapeze's Ringmaster for its capabilities, he also noted that its utility is limited. "Trapeze is so focused on network planning, which is 1 percent of the life of a network," he noted. Airespace or a value added reseller that sells an Airespace platform usually do a lot of the network planning for customers. "What's more important is making sure they have ongoing management," he said. Airespace's software shows the continually changing spectral picture of the network (see photo below).