Bridgewater Supports Windows, SIM-Based Authentication

This week at the 802.11 Planet Conference and Expo in Boston, Bridgewater Systems of Ottawa, Ontario, will be announcing a version of its Wi-Fi Service Manager that runs on Microsoft Windows platforms, both Windows 2000 and 2003 servers, in the enterprise.

Parham Momtahan, the company's vice president of research & development, says a major facet of this new version of the software (which previously ran on Solaris only) is that it is "integrated into the environment. We work with active directory, for example. We've worked with Microsoft in developing this solution."

Wi-Fi Service Manager will now come in two components, one for enterprise, and another for carriers (the Solaris version). The Microsoft solution is targeted at the enterprise side.

The software enables IP service management based on policies, as well as the services that users want. The software takes care of things, such as bandwidth allocation for example, on the access points and controllers. Momtahan says the software is hardware agnostic, saying "we're multivendor, and multi-site, and multi-customer."

The Solaris version will continue to be supported for carriers using the Bridgewater solution. Speaking of, the company earlier this week announced support for GSM carriers to provide SIM-based authentication on Wi-Fi networks. Bridgewater is working with Signaling System 7 (SS7) gateway providers to provide this to carriers, so users on laptops and PDAs at a Wi-Fi can full EAP/SIM authentication, with charges going to their cellular accounts. Bridgewater can provide full authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) services for to carriers using its AAA Services Controller, which in addition to 802.11 logins can handle DSL, dialup, and others. EAP types supported include MD5, LEAP, PEAP, and SIM. The additional authentication support will be available in the third quarter. The company also offers a Revenue Collector and a Session Controller to prevent account sharing.

Bridgewater Systems is just one of the over 90 exhibitors on the show floor this week at the 802.11 Planet Conference & Expo, June 25 - 27, 2003 at the World Trade Center Boston in Boston, MA. Come on down and see them all!