The Turnkey 802.11n WAPs Are Coming
1/13/2009 -- The turnkey 802.11n wireless access points (WAP) are coming. That's one upshot of Cisco's announcement this week of what it bills as a market first: the Aironet 1140 Series, a WAP that both combines 802.11n speeds with what Cisco describes as "deployment simplicity."
"[Cisco is providing] the opportunity for businesses to truly embrace wireless networking and do so in a much higher performance, much more reliable fashion," said Ben Gibson, senior director of mobility solutions, in a Cisco video blog presentation. The announcement, he said, "is about Cisco taking...this next-generation wireless technology capability...mainstream."
Just how is Cisco's new 802.11n WAP device different from its predecessor 802.11n WAP devices -- such as the Aironet 1250 (of which Cisco claims to have sold more than 175,000) -- or WAP devices from other competitors? For one thing, it supports standard Power over Ethernet (PoE), which makes it easier to both deploy and power. It also supports a technology that Cisco calls "M-Drive" -- basically, a proprietary Cisco implementation that's designed to support a "reliable and consistent" RF operation.
The new Aironet 1140 builds on Cisco's Aironet 1250 deliverable, according to Gibson. Unlike that product, however, it's designed for "mainstream deployment across any indoor environment," Gibson said.
It's an anticipatory deliverable, to a degree. "The fundamental question that every customer needs to look at here is is there network ready to meet this oncoming wave of new devices, and not just the devices themselves, but the rather demanding expectations of that new emerging workforce coming into the workforce that's used to being mobile in every sense of their lives," he concluded. "What Cisco's delivered with this 1140 access point is a solution that's designed to not only work with your legacy network environment, but more importantly to make it work better. To be able to take all existing clients that support older standards of Wi-Fi networking and make those work better." --Stephen Swoyer
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