January Wi-Fi Notables

January Wi-Fi Notables

By CWNP On 01/31/2011 - 15 Comments

January was a relatively exciting month in the SMB and enterprise WLAN arena. Here are some of the hot topics that caught my attention.

AirTight Offers Wi-Fi Client Access
AirTight entered the Wi-Fi access game, introducing a radio mode in which WIPS sensors can also serve Wi-Fi clients while performing time-slicing for security and performance scanning. AirTight has previously focused on and excelled at intrusion protection, which is why they’re leading their Wi-Fi access marketing campaign with a focus on security and PCI compliance.

Aruba Announces In-Store Mobile Marketing Solution
Aruba finalized their purchase of Amigopod in December, and that purchase was a strategic stepping stone to this month’s announcement, that Aruba is partnering with Nearbuy and Digby to offer a guest-centric, retail-optimized Wi-Fi solution focused on mobile advertising. Their press release reads a bit like SEO’d keyterm-rich noise, but if you can put together the respective specialties and capabilities of the Aruba, Amigopod, Nearbuy, and Digby solutions, something potent could result. Guest targeted retail advertising will be huge this year, and this news indicates to me that Aruba will be leading the charge.

Wi-Fi Direct Proliferation
The big focus of CES this year was tablets, but Wi-Fi Direct, though less sexy than tablets, also caught my attention. It seems that all electronics, from cameras and blu-ray players to TVs and refrigerators, are coming with Wi-Fi in the future. Most of the devices aren’t proliferating into the market yet, but judging by the consistency of announcements at CES, more consumer devices in the near future will be shipping with Wi-Fi chips and Wi-Fi Direct support/compatibility. Enterprise security (and perhaps more importantly, contention management) folks, start your engines.

Clouds are in the Air
The whole cloud computing experience hasn’t really captured me in any personal way yet (perhaps I’m too busy repressing memories of Microsoft’s “to the cloud” commercials), but cloud-managed networking announcements were huge this month. Meraki, Aerohive, and Dlink each made announcements in this area.

Meraki — Meraki announced the release of two cloud-managed routers, integrating application firewall, traffic shaping, and VPN technologies that were developed for Meraki’s Wi-Fi products. They’ve built the user experience around the same easy-to-use cloud management platform used for their wireless products.

Aerohive — Aerohive announced acquisition of cloud-based network company, Pareto Networks. Pareto focused on cloud network offerings including routing, VPN, and more. Initial press releases indicate that Aerohive will integrate the Pareto software and repurpose some of the hardware concepts to improve their branch and distributed access offerings.

Dlink — Dlink announced a partnership with PowerCloud to strengthen cloud-managed SMB WLAN presence. This platform is billed as a way for SMBs to provide wireless access with a low-cost alternative to enterprise equipment.

What's funny to me is that they all did it first. :)

Blogger Highlights

Revolution WiFi
This has nothing to do with January per se, but I thought I’d throw it out there. Andrew VonNagy is CWNE #84 and a WLAN super-freak (that’s a good thing around here). If you aren’t already reading his blog or following him on Twitter, you really should be. This guy is a skilled and prolific writer-tester-engineer extraordinaire.

His blog: http://revolutionwifi.blogspot.com/
Here’s two ultra-relevant blogs he wrote this month about wireless network segmentation options and how to implement dynamic VLAN assignment.

http://revolutionwifi.blogspot.com/2011/01/wireless-network-segmentation-options.html
http://revolutionwifi.blogspot.com/2011/01/dynamic-vlan-assignment_31.html

Or follow him on Twitter: @revolutionwifi

Metageek
Also, my compliments to Metageek for an excellent blog providing an inside look at how Wi-Spy works. This is a short blog with helpful illustrations that may help clear up some confusion about terminology and functionality relating to spectrum analyzer specs.

http://www.metageek.net/blog/how-wi-spy-works

Tagged with: aruba, Aerohive, AirTight, Meraki, amigopod, nearbuy, digby, Wi-Fi Direct, dlink, cloud

Blog Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within these blog posts are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of the Certitrek, CWNP or its affiliates.