I'm worn out from reading this exhaustive coverage of WLAN switches in Network Computing: The publication invited 18 companies to be involved in their testing, but only four agreed: Airespace, Aruba, Cisco, and Trapeze. That's now three companies; the Airespace acquisition by Cisco happened after testing. There's a long sidebar at the end with explanations from vendors who didn't participate which is particularly interesting if you were considering purchasing hardware and support software from these companies.
One piece of excellent news is that all four products coped extremely well with WPA2, the certified version of 802.11i, through all of the client and back-end mix and match that author Frank Bulk and his crew threw at the systems. Trapeze is the weakest on integrity detection, an increasing theme for 802.1X and both wired and wireless switches. They also noted that Cisco used a CLI or Web browser to configure its access points instead of the WLSE management system, which was telling.
Most miraculously, the article includes apples-to-apples pricing for three scenarios which is information a company might spend weeks trying to gather from reluctant vendors and integrators.
The problem is the tests were performed by an inexperienced and incompetent grad student and copious technical and factual mistakes were made throughout the testing. Some of the statements he makes in the article are flat out vendor lies and FUD. Look for all 4 of the vendors to put out seperate statements correcting or clarifying the test results.
[Editor's note: I'm posting this under protest. The IP address is an Adelphia cable modem address. The coward who posted this attack provides no specifics nor does he or she sign it. Talk about vendor lies and FUD: what's the agenda behind a commenter who can't back up his or her statements with a real email address or real details? This sounds like yet another sock puppet that I challenge to reveal him- or herself. I'm sick of attacks by proxy.
Actually, on reflection, the inside knowledge of this poster means that it's likely someone connected with one of the companies that were unable or unwilling to provide equipment is behind it. I doubt this posting was made with any knowledge of or planning by the company the person works for. --gf]
The WLAN Pricing sidebar was interesting in that it showed a wide variation between vendors. I think a lot of the difference is due to the particular configuration that was priced.
Products from these vendors can be configured in lots of different ways, to give lots of variation in pricing. In my view, this is intended to give the customer more choice (i.e. to hit more price thresholds and deployment scenarios), but it is often confusing.
Cynically, you might say these pricing structures are designed to give the sales and marketing teams something to work with.
What I've found is that enterprise customers are often looking at it from "price per AP deployed" perspective (e.g. 100 APs at $600 each, or whatever). They're then asking vendors with feature parity to be competitive on price.
This doesn’t mean that price is the only thing that counts, but vendors need to be quite close to their competitor’s pricing before the customer will start thinking “I prefer architecture X, with feature Y from vendor Z, so I’ll go with them.”
Just my 2 pence.