What’s the best reason to show up early for a meeting? Often the answer is to get a seat closest to the wireless access point. But as more employees show up at work with tablets and other wireless devices, many access points succumb to interference or overload. A new generation of robust wireless access points is built to address that problem. Today Cisco (NASDAQ: NYSE) introduced its latest offering: the Aironet 3600 series.
Cisco’s new product got a trial run earlier this month at the Republican Presidential debate hosted at the University of South Florida. The debate brought roughly 800 people into the student union, most of whom were using wireless devices. Senior network engineer Joe Rogers says his group replaced older access points with about 30 of the new Cisco products ahead of the debate, and now will proceed to deploy the new access points around the campus. “Large classrooms and high-density study areas are our current focus and the 3600-series access points offer the higher throughput we need,” says Rogers.
The 3600 series is a three spatial stream 802.11n access point. Many products in this category have three antennas on the transmitter end and three on the receiver end, but Cisco has added a fourth antenna. “The fourth antenna is novel, especially on the transmit side,” says analyst Craig Mathias of the Farpoint Group, who has been testing access points in the 802.11n class. Mathias says that all products in this class attempt to improve throughput, range, reliability, and capacity. Cisco says its Aironet 3600 also offers data transfer speeds up to 30% faster than those of its competitors.
With a $1500 price tag, these WAPs are aimed squarely at the enterprise market, particularly larger institutions. Cisco says they enable tablets and other devices with relatively weak wireless signals to “connect seamlessly,” to the Internet, even from a distance. Widespread reliable wireless could give companies more opportunity to distribute content in the cloud (and give employees one less reason to show up early and sit by the access point.)
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