Cisco Systems Introduces Industry Leading Wireless LAN Solution for Small-to-Medium Businesses and Corporate Enterprises

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, March 27, 2000

Cisco Systems, Inc. Monday introduced the Cisco Aironet 340 Series of 11 megabits per second (Mbps) Wireless Local Area Networking (WLAN) products that provides business-class wireless local area networking systems for organizations ranging in size from small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) to corporate enterprises. The new family of IEEE 802.11b-compliant high-speed WLAN solutions delivers the industry's best performance, manageability, scalability and security for both in-building and building-to-building wireless applications. This announcement reinforces Cisco's New World strategy to deliver open standards-based wireless solutions to mobile business environments.

The Aironet 340 Series enables IT managers and business owners to deliver instant access to mobile workers by establishing and maintaining a wireless network connection anywhere throughout a building. The Aironet 340 Series products are ideal for dynamic environments that require a flexible wireless LAN solution that can change as the business grows, is cost-effective and is simple to deploy and re-deploy. The Aironet solution also provides an affordable building-to-building wireless network solution, and delivers cost and deployment benefits by eliminating the need for recurring leased line charges, frustrating installation delays and physical barriers between buildings.

"Many SMB and enterprise customers across a multitude of industries are deploying WLANS for a variety of applications including in-building mobile network access, a wireless complement or alternative to a wired network, and as a solution for building-to-building connections," said Mike Francini, marketing director in Cisco Systems' Desktop Switching Business Unit. "These users see the value of constant, reliable, high speed access to the enterprise data infrastructure. The challenge is to deliver wireless network access that is as high-performance, secure, manageable and scalable as the wired network. The Aironet products achieve this, and represent the industry's best WLAN solution for enterprise and SMB customers."

Product Description The Aironet 340 Series is a comprehensive, integrated family of access points, and easy-to-install PC Card, PCI and ISA client adapters, Ethernet clients, as well as line-of-sight outdoor bridges. Client driver support includes Windows 95, 98, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Novell Netware. The Aironet 340 Series access points can serve as the center point of a stand-alone wireless network or as the connection point between wireless and wired 10/100 Ethernet networks. The Aironet wireless bridge products provide point-to-point or point-to-multipoint connections between buildings as much as 25 miles line away For Ethernet-equipped devices without an expansion bus, Cisco provides Ethernet client and multi-client adapters that support up to four MAC addresses for support of multiple Ethernet-equipped devices using an inexpensive Ethernet hub. As part of the Aironet 340 series, Cisco offers a wide range of antennas, cable and accessories, enabling customized deployments to suit the specific needs of varying applications.

"Cisco's Aironet 340 Series wireless products are ideal for building standalone networks in facilities where wires aren't feasible," said David Rickling, lead network engineer at E*TRADE. "Cisco's wireless LAN products allow us to save expenses by quickly deploying network connectivity within a building, preserves a capital investment that can be redeployed in another facility, and provides flexibility in delivering seamless network access to mobile workers while maintaining all the benefits of a wired network."

Enterprise-Class Features Based on direct sequence spread spectrum technology, the Aironet 340 Series 11 Mbps high-speed wireless solution provides Ethernet-like bandwidth needed for mainstream business applications. The industry- leading throughput of the Aironet 340 series enables high performance transfer of bandwidth-intensive data such as multimedia streams and large data files.

The Aironet 340 Series products can be seamlessly integrated into wired Ethernet networks and are tested for interoperability with other IEEE 802.11b compliant products. This enables users to add to an existing wireless LAN, build a complete wireless network, or add a wireless extension to a wired LAN. To optimize mobility and coverage within a WLAN, the Aironet 340 series supports Cisco's enhanced roaming features that use non-overlapping radio channels to provide multiple, virtual wireless LANs for aggregated capacity and throughput.

The Aironet 340 Series' robust management capabilities include support for Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), telnet and web-based management that integrate easily into an existing LAN management infrastructure, including CiscoWorks 2000. The products' web-based management features allow for simple configuration and diagnostics of the wireless network. In addition, software utilities are included that simplify site surveys and help users optimize their WLAN designs.