Cisco Unveils First Line Of 802.11g WLAN Products

Tom Hagin, vice president of sales at NetXperts, a Cisco Premiere Partner specializing in wireless, VPN/security and IP telephony based in San Ramon, Calif., said the announcement is significant for his base of enterprise customers.

"They have been hounding us because they want wireless, they want Cisco, but they want [802.11]g," said Hagin. "This will open the floodgates for those customers waiting for [Cisco] g products."

The new Cisco Aironet 1100 and 1200 APs are designed for full backward compatibility with Cisco Aironet and Cisco Compatible 802.11b clients and the Cisco Wireless IP Phone 7920. For security, Cisco said Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are supported in the hardware. The security features will be enabled for all Cisco Aironet 802.11g devices in 2004 via a free software upgrade after the ratification of the IEEE 802.11i standard, expected by the end of this year.

Cisco's new 802.11 a/b/g-enabled client adapters in CardBus and PCI form factors support Windows XP and Windows 2000 operating systems. The new 802.11g products are being offered at the same price as the Cisco Aironet 802.11b versions. The 802.11g WLAN standard was approved by the IEEE earlier this year.

Hagin said most of his customers have a Cisco infrastructure, and the wireless products, including earlier 802.11g releases from vendors such as Linksys, although a division of Cisco, are not really designed for the enterprise. NetXperts has been working with the Cisco Aironet 1200 platform and gives it high marks because it offers solid upgrade protection for changing wireless standards, said Hagin.

"So when you look at all the deployments we've done with [802.11]b, we already have a methodology to do some relatively brief resurveying and redeployment for g, only because the coverage patterns are a little bit different," he said. .

Set to ship by the end of November, the Cisco Aironet 1100 and 1200 Series APs have a U.S. list price of $599 and $899, respectively, and the 802.11g upgrade kit is priced at $149. The Cisco Aironet 802.11 a/b/g CardBus, scheduled for a 2004 first-quarter release, has a $169 list price and the PCI Card has a $249 list price.

Cisco also moved its Cisco Compatible Extensions program forward by announcing that notebook PCs with embedded Wi-Fi from vendors such as Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Toshiba, along with client adapters from Linksys and Netgear, have been approved as Cisco Compatible.

Cisco's Compatible Extensions program, introduced earlier this year, is aimed at allowing solution providers to deploy a Cisco WLAN with a variety of Wi-Fi mobile devices and client adapters.

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