Vendors Flood Market With New Wireless Gear

"Enterprise Wi-Fi is still in its early stages. A lot of enterprises have been slow to adopt it, but for a lot of folks, 802.11n is what's going to get them to deploy, so there's a lot of new opportunity for resellers," said David Cohen, director of product marketing at Trapeze, Pleasanton, Calif.

To help capitalize on that opportunity, the company built the MP-432 so that customers would be able to leverage investments they've already made in Trapeze WLAN infrastructure, Cohen said. For example, customers will be able to use their existing Trapeze MX WLAN controllers with the new access point because of the vendor's Smart Mobile architecture, unveiled last fall. With Smart Mobile, traffic does not have to pass through the controller, meaning the WLAN switch will not cause a bottleneck in network performance as the higher-capacity 802.11n access points are deployed, Cohen said.

In addition, customers can utilize their existing 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE)-compatible power injectors with the MP-432, even though 802.11n access points draw more power than their predecessors, he said.

"You can utilize the lower 802.3af injectors and still get full 11n [performance] on one or the other band, but not at the same time ... But if you have a PoE rack-mounted injector and you have unused ports, you can draw another line to the MP-432's second port and get full power. That's no small feat. A lot of engineering went into that," Cohen said, noting that the access point also supports the forthcoming high-power 802.3at PoE standard.

Trapeze expects pricing, which has not yet been finalized, to be less than $1,500. The MP-432 is expected to ship in the fourth quarter.

Meantime, Ruckus is entering the SMB WLAN market with the introduction of ZoneFlex, along with a channel program it says will provide partners with margins of up to 35 percent. The ZoneFlex Wi-Fi family includes the vendor's BeamFlex technology, which enables an antenna array that can reconfigure itself to find the best signal path to each user.

Ruckus access points also can use mesh networking to communicate without connecting back to the controller. New products, which will be demonstrated at the CRN Hall of Fame event at Interop, include the ZoneDirector 1000 controller, ZoneFlex 2942 802.11g and access points, and the ZoneFlex 2925 desktop access point. The products are scheduled for availability this summer, with controllers starting at $1,200 and access points starting at $259. The company plans to launch an 802.11n access point in the third quarter.

NEXT: More Interop product launches from Nortel, Netgear and others.