Lucent Technologies wants to make point-of-sale terminals and peripherals as portable as cell phones for retailers, schools and health-care organizations.

One of the latest products to come from the company and its Bell Labs research and development arm is the WaveLAN Ethernet Converter (EC). The product allows scanners, terminals and printers to communicate wirelessly with nodes linked to a corporate network or the Internet.

The converter is roughly the size of a paperback novel, said E.J. von Schaumburg, U.S. business development manager for WaveLAN at Lucent, Murray Hill. "Retailers can use it to move POS terminals and cash registers wherever they need to for sales and special events. Warehouse managers can relocate scanners to freight areas."

The product joins an array of similar offerings from Lucent, including a desktop line of converters, as well as access-point devices serving as the bridge between wired and wireless networks. Other products include the WaveLAN/IEEE; WaveLAN/IEEE Silver, with 40-bit encryption; and the WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo, for which Lucent is slated to provide support sometime this month.

Lucent works with about 100 VARs worldwide that deploy solutions in a bevy of markets, including retail, health care, education and transportation, said von Schaumburg. "Most of our channel sales go through distributors, but the convergence of voice and data is the trend nowadays, and that's becoming an increasingly VAR-centric process," he said.

"We've chosen only network-savvy partners," said von Schaumburg, adding Westcon Inc. and NCR Corp. are two of the biggest distributors or integrators of Lucent products.

The new WaveLAN converter comes in two versions, both of which use a PC Card architecture. The EC is for Ethernet (10BaseT) devices and carries a suggested price of $295. The EC-S costs $395 and is for devices with an Ethernet or serial (RS-232) interface, or both.

The inclusion of a serial interface makes it possible to connect older equipment to a wireless network without having to change the host's application software.