Motorola Adds 802.11n Gear To Wireless Vision

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Motorola on Wednesday released gear leveraging the new 802.11n wireless standard, tools the vendor said helps round out its vision of the "all wireless enterprise."

The releases, which come from the San Jose, Calif.-based vendor's enterprise mobility business, come months after other wireless players like Cisco Systems, D-Link, Meru Networks and Colubris Networks hit the market with gear that is 11n enabled, but according to Kevin Goulet, senior director of product marketing, Motorola was late to the party on purpose.

"We wanted to do as much as we could with these solutions," he said. "We didn't want to do a 'me too.'"

At its Wireless Innovations Day in Boston, Motorola brass laid out the specifications for two new solutions based on 802.11n, which is currently in draft form and awaiting official ratification.

First, Motorola introduced an 802.11n wireless LAN switch for the midmarket, the RFS6000. The switch supports both Power over Ethernet (PoE) and PoE+, said Sujai Hajela, enterprise WLAN vice president and general manager of Motorola's enterprise mobility business.

The "network-in-a-box" is based on Wireless Next Generation (Wi-NG) architecture and includes eight high-power PoE ports for 11n; a PCI express slot for wireless WAN backhaul 3G.4G services like EVDO, HSDPA and WiMAX; and a PCI expansion slot for services such as IP PPX. The RFS6000 can support up to 48 802.11 a/b/g/n access points to provide coverage for up to 2,000 users. The switch also eliminates the need to run separate voice and data cables to each enterprise user.

Additionally, the RFS6000 includes integrated security mechanisms, including 802.1x authentication, WPA/WPA2, stateful inspection firewall, VPN, AAA server and NAC support. It also supports network hardware compliance for PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley out-of-the-box, Hajela said.

Goulet said the RFS6000 offers resilience with mesh, adaptive technology and clustering capabilities. For companies looking to deploy Voice over WLAN the switch can support toll quality VoWLAN with QoS and Wi-Fi Multimedia Extensions for roaming across Layer 3 boundaries both inside and outside.

Motorola also announced the release of its first 802.11n access point, the AP-7131, a tri-radio 11n access point. The three 802.11n radios can support high-speed client access, mesh backhaul and dedicated dual-band IPS. Like the RFS6000 switch, the AP-7131 also features an expansion slot that allows the third radio to be upgraded to enable 3G/4G technology like WiMAX for primary connectivity or redundancy in case the WAN drops out.

The AP-7131 offers 24/7 intrusion protection. The third radio in the access point eliminates the need for a dedicated sensor access point, ultimately reducing the cost of secure wireless deployments. Goulet said a second wireless overlay of sensors is no longer needed, like with single or dual-radio access points.

AP-7131 features a fully Dynamic Frequency Selection-compliant chipset, a fast MIPS network processor with hardware-accelerated encryption and dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and can deliver connections speeds of up to 600 Mbps.

Next: More On 11n

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