802.11 standard: A goldmine for Aussie channel

The 11n standard is backwards compatible and allows for wireless throughput up to 300Mbps. With Cisco recently forecast to push the technology in 2008, devices using Draft 2.0 of the 11n standard have received certification from wireless standards association the Wi-Fi Alliance.

“People have already adopted the Draft 2.0 standard,” said Colin Bradley, advanced technologies lead for Security & Mobility Cisco A/NZ. “The standard was viewed to be robust enough for the Wi-Fi Alliance to pretty much give its seal of approval so that people could start deploying it with confidence.”

As always, new networking technology provides resellers and integrators with the opportunity to generate new business. According to Bradley, resellers stand to profit by explaining to their customers the range of new functionality that 11n allows.

“If you were going to buy an access point today you’re going to have greater surety from a longevity perspective by buying an 11n access point. 11n allows you improvements in range, in quality and in density. Especially where there are requirements for higher bandwidth applications, or you’ve actually got applications such as voice that you now want to run across the wireless infrastructure, then 11n is by far the better technology to do that,” he said.

“What people are actually finding is that supplementing existing wireless installation with 11n access points actually helps to improve the overall performance of the traditional Wi-Fi environment.”

Bradley said that new business applications will be developed to utilise the increased data capacity of 11n.

“Wireless is not a replacement for wired, but it is becoming a more flexible, and as we’ve made the improvements to 11n, a more robust environment for people to run business grade applications over,” he said.

An area that will see rapid expansion over the next few years according to Bradley is in the use use of location-based tracking and RFID (Radio-frequency identification) in the retail, logistics, health and aged care, and manufacturing industries.

While the channel stands to do very well from uptake of 11n products, they also have a crucial part to play in ensuring that customers using wireless networks remain vigilant about network security according to Bradley.

“When you use the correct form of authentication, you’re using encryption and your management plan is actually protected. All of those things are there and built in to the technology. It’s then about how things are implemented by the reseller community that really dictate how successful the implementation is going to be,” he said.

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