Aruba's 10000th 802.11n AP

Aruba Networks announced that its shipments of 802.11n enabled access points have passed a milestone 10,000 units. Aruba announced its dual-radio AP-124 and AP-125 802.11n Access Point family in November 2007, and volume shipments commenced in February 2008. The company's AP-124ABG and AP-125ABG field-upgradable access points were announced last month. Based on 2nd generation RF chips, the access points can be powered from a single 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet source and feature 3x3 MIMO operation and ultra-compact packaging.

"The second half of 2007 saw the first shipments of coordinated enterprise-class '802.11n Draft 2.0 Wi-Fi Certified' access points," said Gartner Senior Research Analyst Christian Canales, author of Gartner Dataquest's 2008 Market Share: Enterprise Wireless LAN Equipment, Worldwide, 4Q07 and 2007 report. "Worldwide revenue from sales of WLAN enterprise equipment increased more than 10% from 2006 to 2007, and coordinated access points accounted for 48% of the overall enterprise access point shipments in the last quarter of 2007, versus just 39% in the last quarter of 2006."

The California State University system, recipient of the 10,000th 802.11n access point, selected Aruba's wireless networks for use across its 23 campuses in September 2007. With nearly 450,000 students and 46,000 faculty and staff members, the California State University system is the largest in the country. Aruba was selected after it passed a stringent functional test, and demonstrated the lowest total cost of ownership for the specific criteria used in the evaluation.

Aruba's implementation of 802.11n offers substantive ease-of-use, performance, and interoperability advantages over competing solutions. Aruba's Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) technology automates wireless LAN set-up and maintenance, and adapts the network in real-time to accommodate user behavior, interference, and nearby networks. ARM features include:

• Airtime fairness to ensure that slower 802.11b/g clients have minimal impact on high speed 802.11n clients in lecture halls, trading floors, convention centers, and logistics facilities with densely deployed clients
• Co-channel interference management for the highest possible throughput in the presence of nearby access points and RF transmitters;
• Intelligent client steering to provide high speed clients with access to the greatest available bandwidth by associating them with the best band, channel and access point.

Interoperability tests published in March validated the efficacy of ARM - laptops containing wireless radio chip sets from Atheros, Broadcom, and Intel delivered the highest throughput with Aruba's 802.11n solution compared with three competing wireless LANs.

"Ease of use, high performance, and interoperability are the hallmarks of Aruba's 802.11n solution, and the fast uptake of our 802.11n access points reflects the importance of these features to customers," said Keerti Melkote, Aruba's co-founder and head of products and partnerships. "Not content to sit on our laurels, we continue to drive innovation into the 802.11n market. A case in point is our new line of economical 802.11a/b/g access points that can be upgraded via software download to 802.11n Draft2.0."

Source Aruba Networks