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The 802.11 a access point market is starting to fill out with SOHO and enterprise players. We found Proxim's product hits all the right notes. BY SATISH LAXMINARAYANAN AND DAVE MOLTA
We've always preached that a little bit of bandwidth could go a long way for enterprise wireless networking, but for some applications, there's no substitute for speed. So when we started seeing products based on the 802.11a standard, which promises a roughly fivefold performance increase over mainstream 802.11b WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) technology, we couldn't resist the lure of a comparative product review. Although there are plenty of gotchas, overall we liked what we saw.
Hot as the WLAN (wireless LAN) market is these days, significant deployment obstacles remain. By far the No. 1 concern is the lack of standards-based security, and though a couple of 11a vendors now offer support for the 802.1x standard, you won't find any security breakthroughs in the products we tested. Most of you will still have to implement a security overlay until more robust standards take hold-- we hope in the coming year. (For more on securing your WLAN, see www.nwc.com/1312/1312fl.html).
But security isn't the only concern of enterprise IT managers contemplating WLAN deployments or expansions. Limited money and staff mean widespread deployments remain a pipe dream for many IT managers, unless they can prove a compelling short-term return on investment. And then there's the fear that investing in today's most popular WLAN technology-802.11b WiFi-will leave you wishing you had waited just a little longer for a higher-performance system.
That's where 802.11a comes in. Although first approved in 1999, 802.11a has been slow to take off, not only because engineering 11a chipsets is challenging but also because the success of 802.11b has made that system a de facto standard. The landscape changed in 2001, however, when Atheros Communications began volume shipment of its 802.11a chipset. Until then, a war of white papers raged, with some touting 11a as the solution to emerging WLAN performance and capacity problems and others speculating that 11a products would have range limitations of 30 feet. Thus, when we took a look at the first 802.11a offerings, we didn't have high expectations. When the dust settled, we discovered some truth on both sides of...