Eric Griffith

Tradeshows mean sore feet, red-eye flights — and lots of new products. Here are some of the latest 802.11 products announced at Networld+Interop in Las Vegas. Netgear’s Pro-Safe Dual-Band Wireless VPN Firewall (model FWAG114) is for small to medium businesses. It supports 802.11a and g in one router that incorporates two virtual private network (VPN) […]

The Wi-Fi Alliance created Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) in October of 2002 as a stepping stone between the sullied Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption that has long been part of the 802.11 specifications, and the upcoming 802.11i standard that will bring IEEE endorsed security to WLANs. At the time, they said WPA products should appear […]

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones that run over you existing LAN are nothing new, and neither are their wireless brethren that carry voice traffic over the 802.11 connections in the office. But despite wireless VoIP’s success in some vertical markets, it hasn’t exactly gone mainstream. But that might change as of this week. Seeing […]

Next week Legra Systems of Burlington, Mass. will be announcing their wireless switch platform, the latest in the glut of WLAN switches announced in the last few weeks from startups like Airespace and Trapeze Networks and established players like Extreme Networks and Nortel. Legra isn’t talking product specifics yet, but while giving a basic introduction […]

“No matter the shape or size of a hotspot,” says Daryl Schoolar, “they must have backhaul.” Backhaul, the connection from a location that goes back to the Internet backbone (sometimes called the final- or last-mile connection) can take a lot of forms, both wired and wireless, costly to downright cheap. Schoolar, a senior analyst with […]

Next week at NetWorld+Interop 2003 in Las Vegas, established WLAN management vendor Bluesocket will be joining the ever-growing switch market. The Burlington, MA-based company will be releasing the WGX-4000 Switch Wireless Gateway, a third generation gateway product that adds switching and management for WLAN products from multiple vendors. In the words of Bluesocket CEO Eric […]

Aruba Networks was one of the first startup companies to make noise this year in the nascent WLAN switch market. Now the company has announced its product line, including a modular approach to the switch itself. Keerti Melkote, Aruba’s co-founder and vice president of product management, says “customers today are in a great deal of […]

Walking around with a WLAN analyzer in your hand isn’t enough anymore — it certainly won’t let you see the entire network at once. So AirMagnet is getting distributed. Specifically, the company behind the laptop and handheld-based WLAN analyzer tools is releasing AirMagnet Distributed 1.0, a system that Chia-Chee Kuan, CTO and vice president of […]

Today, Austin, TX-based fables-WLAN component company Bandspeed, announced Gypsy, the company’s WLAN switch technology. They plan to license it to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for the creation of products that would sit on the edge of the wireless network where access points traditionally go, instead of using a “thin” access point and a switch back […]

Portland, Ore., has been vying for the title of "Most Unwired City" in the United States for a while, as it quickly embraces public access wireless. It was even ranked number one in such a study funded by Intel, which took into account Wi-Fi hotspots, cellular coverage, and total Internet access penetration. Portland, or more […]

It’s been a busy month for WildPackets. The Walnut Creek, CA-based creator of the AiroPeek line of wireless analysis tools has announced various milestones: they are now in the hardware business, as beta testing began on their RFGrabber probes, they added support for Agere Systems drivers to AiroPeek; and yesterday they announced the upgrade to […]

The two major purveyors of wireless LAN curriculums designed to turn network administrators into full-fledged certified Wi-Fi experts have released new programs and certifications. Earlier this month GigaWave Technologies of San Antonio, TX, a Cisco Learning Solutions Partner and the group behind Cisco’s various Aironet-specific courses and training including one specializing in public access, unveiled […]