Some of the biggest names in the wireless LAN industry this week plan to unveil products that could help define the next stage for enterprise wireless networks.

The products are from hardware vendors Aruba Wireless Networks, Cisco and Symbol Technologies, and software vendor Network Chemistry, which offers a wireless intrusion-detection and -prevention system. As a whole, the offerings define an enterprise WLAN as an infrastructure that:

• Supports 802.11g and 802.11a radios at the same time, for maximum capacity.

• Marries user and device information with centralized security policies.

• Expands control over the airwaves, to combat rogue connections and minimize interference.

"The big question is, how do you manage the security and reliability of the WLAN, and do that in a way that's operationally efficient?" says Abner Germanow, program manager for enterprise networking and WLANs at IDC. "That's one of the common elements you can see in these and other recent announcements."

Cisco, which dominates the access point market with a 40% share, now is selling its first access points - the Aironet 1130 and 1230 - with 802.11g and 802.11a radios already installed. In the past, some of the single-radio Aironet devices could be upgraded by plugging in a second radio.

Symbol now offers a similar dual-radio access point, the AP 300. It's the first Symbol product to support 802.11g, which some vendors first offered a year ago. Symbol delayed until it got the kind of 802.11g silicon it wanted from chipmaker Conexant.

These twin-radio access points not only work with any WLAN client, 802.11b, g or a, but also dramatically increase WLAN capacity. Together, 802.11g and 802.11a offer 15 radio channels at each access point. This means more users can share a larger data pipe, with a data rate of 54M bit/sec, than is possible with just the three channels of 802.11b.

Extra channels are good, says Craig Mathias, an analyst at Farpoint Group. "You want to optimize for capacity," he says. "The pitch we make to our end-user clients is, you're going to get a lot more capacity [with more channels], and you'll need that capacity as you start to put things like voice calls on your WLAN net."

Cisco's Aironet 1130AG, in a plastic case with built-in omnidirectional antenna for wall mounting, costs $700; the 1230AG casing meets codes for installation above drop-ceilings, and can be matched to various directional antennas. It costs $1,000. Symbol's AP 300 costs half that amount.

The AP 300 is a thin access point,stripped down to little more than the two radios, with intelligence shifted to the WLAN switch. The intelligence is in Symbol's WLAN switch products. The company is releasing Version 1.5 of its software for the WS2000 switch, which combines an access point with a stateful firewall, Power-over-Ethernet support, a WAN uplink and storage in a compact, four-port box.

The new software supports Advanced Encryption Standard encryption and the rest of the 802.11i security standard, including Pairwise Master Key (PMK) Caching. PMK caching is a technique for sidestepping the need to re-establish security each time a wireless client moves to a new access point, according to Gary Singh, senior director of marketing for Symbol. WS2000 pricing is unchanged at about $1,000.

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