Wave Wireless Networking says the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has formally certified its SPEEDLAN 9000 line of 11Mbps routers. Because 802.11b uses an unlicensed radio band, FCC certification is required for release of WLAN products in the United States.
“All [802.11b] units are sold as unlicensed devices [in the U.S.], so the burden shifts to the manufacturer to license,” says Patrick Pacifico, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Wave Wireless. “We take our stuff to a test house sanctioned by the FCC as a certifying authority and they take it and do test for any kind of electromagnetic interference generated in any band, they test the harmonics of the frequency you’re transmitting at… they make sure you’re not spewing into someone’s else licensed band above or below 2.4GHz.”
The SPEEDLAN 9000 series was first announced about a year ago as a concept, but the product was held up more by the economic realities of cutbacks than by the FCC. “You can do a couple days worth of testing, and then you wait a couple weeks to get test reports written up, and then the test house files paperwork with the FCC. It only took us a few weeks,” says Pacifico.
The 9000 products will let business customers setup a wireless, Internet-sharing LAN using a building-to-building setup at a 25-mile distance, a point-to-multipoint with polling base station (star topology), or a self-healing mesh network with no central site to reroute signals past obstacles.
For security the 9000 products use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and a NAT firewall. The 9000 routers can act as a Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) server ore client. Network settings are controlled via a Windows interface called SPEEDView, while the separate Web-based SPEEDLAN 9000 Configurator lets managers monitor security and IP addressing as well as run diagnostic tests.
The various models of SPEEDLAN 9000 include the mesh-only 9101 (with 8 dBi integrated omni-directional antenna, $1199) and residential 9104 (with 5dBi antenna, $899), plus the 9102 ($1299) and 9103 ($1799) which both support all three types of setup though the 9103 is preconfigured for a point-to-multipoint setup.
Wave Wireless is a division of SPEEDCOM Wireless of Sarasota, FL.
