Nortel unwires business networks

Nortel has announced a plan to integrate so-called 4G wireless technologies like WiMax, Mesh and 802.11n into business network infrastructures.

Called the "Unwired Enterprise", Nortel is pointing to the costs and physical constraints of traditional office cabling as a driver for this move, as well as cost savings for firms using dual-mode (wireless and cellular) fixed mobile convergence (FMC) devices.

Nortel's portfolio leader for enterprise products Simon Wilson said that Nortel was stepping up its R & D efforts and working on in-house 802.11n technology. However, he pointed out that unlike some other enterprise wireless vendors like Colubris and Meru, Nortel would not be releasing products yet.

"The fact is these are all pre-N systems and from our engineers perspective, the standard is still not close enough for ratification to guarantee you won't need a hardware swap to be compliant," he added.

Wilson explained that Nortel have customers with large networks and campuses. "We're rolling out wireless to whole airports – and systems like these take anything between two and five years to roll out, so a technology break in the middle would be disastrous."

Currently Nortel is looking to launch 802.11n systems mid-2008, but if the standard ratification process moves quicker, the launch will be brought forward, the firm said.

As to the mesh component of the plan, Wilson said that Nortel had had a mesh solution for sometime, because "it's tough to backhaul" for large open areas where enterprises want wireless coverage.

"I'm talking about things like railway marshalling yards, and container ports where backhaul is challenging and could be dangerous," he added. "What we're talking about here is to integrate these new technologies into our mesh solution to form a coherent end-to-end system."

Nortel is linking its 802.11n rollouts with its WiMax developments and is having discussions with mobile operators about linking wireless LANs with WiMax systems. Asked whether the UK could see WiMax rollouts integrated with their other wireless systems, Wilson said, "This is a global announcement and obviously every country has their own regulatory approval process and their own spectrum [allocation policies]. Any restrictions on frequency in the UK may not apply in EMEA and the rest of the world."

Nortel is also not going down the route of a so-called 'overlay network', where wireless is just added, but not integrated fully, with the wired network. "We're integrating security and switching capability into our Ethernet switches at the edge and the core, because backhauling all the 802.11n traffic [which could be 20 x faster than current wireless speeds] to a security switch is not the way to go."

Wilson added that firms needed an intelligent network to differentiate between sensitive traffic, which may need backhauling to the security switch, and traffic like peer-to-peer traffic which may just need switching locally.

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