A Better Wireless Hub?

 
Aug 13, 2005

by Judith Dinowitz

As techies, as Internet junkies (yes, I'll admit I'm addicted), we want to be online, even when we're away at conferences, socializing and sitting in on sessions. But at conferences I've attended in the past, I remember the bumps in the road to connectivity ... wireless access that wouldn't reach to certain areas, slow bandwidth issues with networks that were overloaded, and sometimes no access at all.

Enter Xirrus' new wireless LAN array, which packs many radios and a wireless switch into a single chassis. According to eWeek's review, this revolutionary design will apparently make it much easier to do high-density, indoor wireless networks inexpensively and without the extensive installation that traditional Wireless LANs require.

The array costs $12,000, and eWeek says that it handled its load well, allowing them to transmit 240M bps of concurrent unencrypted wireless traffic with 15 IAPs active. The article only had one complaint: If a channel was saturated, the array could not readily load balance wireless traffic from the saturated channel to an underused one. The article states that eWeek "configured several clients to hammer away on a single channel, but the array's controller wouldn't move any of the clients to the unused adjacent channel." Apparently, the array's controller relies on clients to make such decisions, but Xirrus representatives have stated that improved load balancing functionality is coming soon.

I could imagine that such an array might make things like wireless access at conferences much easier.

Xirrus Eases Wireless Network Deployment (eWeek, August 8, 2005)

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