Six Wi-Fi vendors have faced off in the second annual 802.11n Challenge, which recently published at broadband networking resource site Webtorials.
The challenge, published by Layland Consulting, myself and Webtorials, provides a venue in which 802.11n system vendors can articulate their primary value propositions to enterprises that could use a "cheat sheet" about the various contenders. This year's participants are Aerohive, Bluesocket, Cisco, Enterasys, Motorola and Trapeze Networks.
Major Wi-Fi changes ahead
Note that all enterprise-class Wi-Fi vendors are invited to participate. However, given that the annual challenge is a sponsored event, some may choose to participate or not participate in any given year for budgetary or other reasons.
Those who are represented this year have distinguished themselves in a variety of ways. Some attacked enterprise migration costs and issues with technical differentiators in their architectures that help enterprises avoid the need to upgrade their Ethernet and power environments to take advantage of 802.11n.
Others focused on getting Wi-Fi, now emerging as a primary data access network, to emulate Ethernet performance and reliability as closely as possible with tools that fight interference and boost the performance of latency-sensitive voice and video applications. Others discussed their abilities to closely merge the care and feeding of wired and wireless networks.
Take a look-see at these documents to understand how the six vendors primarily differentiate themselves from their competitors. And note: There's a Part 2 of this challenge. More interactive and contextual, Part 2 will involve a series of multivendor panel discussions, offered in an audio roundtable format, among the participating vendors.
These will be available at no charge at the Webtorials site in June. Representatives from two to three companies will come together in each of four to six audio roundtables to discuss, in greater depth, how to conquer 11n migration, performance and interference issues and to swap strategies for wireless business continuity, wired/wireless integration and other topics.
Source: networkworld