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"Steerable" WiFi at $9,000 generates skepticism

It was touted as the technology which would revolutionise office wireless: a "steerable WiFi switch" using a phased antenna array to direct individual data packets to individual PCs - and at last, Vivato has revealed that one of its switches will cost $8,995 and ship in May. But will it work?

Initial response from individuals working in the WLAN business was sceptical about Vivato's claim that it would be "able to support about 150 enterprise users-tracking active users as they move about the office within its 100-degree field of view" as the company demonstrated its technology at Demo 2003.

"The dramatic capacity and range of a single Vivato Wi-Fi switch creates a better alternative to managing multiple access points by significantly reducing or eliminating the costs of installation, wiring and software currently required to deploy a large-scale Wi-Fi network," claimed the demonstrator.

Some installers were enthusiastic. "Vivato switches offer a new way to deploy Wi-Fi technology," said Chris Marco, President of TerraWave Solutions, a value added distributor wireless LANs. "Vivato's Wi-Fi switch can simplify wireless deployments by providing a solution that addresses scalability, management and security issues."

But other installers were unconvinced, saying they would wait for shipping product before getting excited.

One technologist, asking for anonymity, said that he would be surprised if it made much difference where it mattered. "Typically, the problem isn't in placing access points for low-traffic use anyway," he said. "It gets tricky when you have peaks; when, say 40 people crowd into a meeting room that normally has five or six; or when a lot of users try to download streaming data at the same time. Frankly, it doesn't matter much if you can supply a whole floor from a single TV-sized device rather than four or five APs - that won't affect costs significantly. The point is whether the new device can make clusters easier to manage, and my prediction is, it won't."

And at $9,000 per switch, he added, "you would have to install an awful lot of $200 access points to spend as much money."

Vivato's WiFi switch is a flat panel unit, which resembles a plasma television screen, operates in the 2.4 GHz frequency band and delivers three simultaneous beams of Wi-Fi.

Designed to be wall-mounted, the panel employs Vivato's patent-pending PacketSteering technology to dynamically shape very narrow beams, about nine degrees each, which transmit and receive WiFi on a packet-by-packet basis to maximize capacity and minimize interference.

According to the official announcement the Indoor WiFi switch has three layers of advanced security, including 802.1x authentication with per station keys, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Virtual LANs (VLANs). At the WiFi level, Vivato's switches support the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) for data privacy and have the hardware required for supporting the future IEEE 802.11i standard.

"We believe the invention of the Wi-Fi switch will have a profound impact on enterprise networking similar to the transition from shared Ethernet to switched Ethernet," said Vivato CEO and Chairman Ken Biba. "Vivato is excited to bring our products to market and begin to deliver on that promise. We are the first to provide our channel partners with a Wi-Fi networking system that scales to enterprise dimensions."