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Public wireless access points will get cheaper - Symbol

The intelligence in a wireless access point is too great, says Symbol, launching its Mobius wireless system. This puts all the brains of virtual private networking, permissions and other management, in a central box, leaving the access point (AP) as a minimal, and cheaper, bit of electronics. Ideal for low-cost public access providers?

When a product wins a "best of show" award at Networld+Interop it's worth taking seriously; Mobius, which Symbol launched a week ago in America, did win that. It's now doing the European marketing tour and will ship in November, cutting the price of top-of-range wireless networking almost in half, according to Ray Martino, marketing boss, who arrived in London yesterday to show it off.

Amazingly, Symbol executives still appear not to have heard of Microwave Photonics as the next step in the process of turning the wireless transceiver into a throwaway component. But they have turned back from the brink of producing the nightmare of a three-standard or even four-standard wireless box which seems to be the way Intel is heading with its dual-standard 802.11a plus 11b access points.

Martino reckons that a major obstacle to growth of wireless, is the cost of ownership. He reckons that current designs for business APs cost around $700, and Mobius will cut this to around $200.

"Cost of ownership is high. One component of this is the cost of hardware - even though it is coming down, the cost of enterprise wireless LAN hardware is still high. And the cost of supporting has been high. One is the upgrading constantly; new features have been implemented in software which won't run on old access points so it's been a case of rip and replace," he said.

The full press release makes it clear that the new technology from Symbol is focused on public access wireless providers, and their needs: "It reduces the technical, deployment and management challenges for Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) rolling-out Wi-Fi wireless "hot-spots." First demonstration of its suitability was at N+I in Atlanta last week, where Symbol reckons they were supporting over 1,000 wireless users.

So far, no technical reviews have been published. Symbol says that its concept is "radically different" from the Proxim technology which puts most of the control sub-systems into a switch box; but few commentators have been able to explain in much detail what the differences are.

Symbol says that it has a wireless switch, which sits on top of the Ethernet hub. "Proxim has done the right idea, but a limited execution," says Martino. "With their controller as they call it, they control it, but the AP does a lot of intelligent things. We have extended this idea; the things that sit in the ceiling won't do security, they won't make MAC decisions like sending out net IDs. All those functions will happen in the switch. It's a leap forward from the Proxim model of a controller; the switch processes all the packets. The things in the ceiling just take what is on the wired side, a packet, and encapsulate it."

As an example, Martino quotes a project done in the education market. "I had a student population, teacher population, maintenance and security, and visitors. I'd like them to have wireless access, but a different type of access in each case. Visitors can have Internet; but that's all. So I set up a VLAN through the wireless switch, with open security, only to the Internet. Further, I can allocate bandwidth; say, only 10% of my wireless bandwidth goes to these visitors. The queueing is handled in the switch. Then the student can get to certain servers; and again for the professors, there's another level of access and privileges. I can do things centrally, like shut off Instant Messaging for the students during an examination. I can do that quite rapidly. We don't have to do it in all the devices on the ceiling; you just configure the switch."

Symbol quotes "typical prices" which suggest that for a ten-point wireless LAN, total hardware costs roughly halve compared with previous generation APs, but suggests that the real savings will come when new features have to be introduced - new security features, etc - which can be programmed into the Mobius WLAN switch box, leaving the AP devices untouched.