Cisco: New mantra compatible to Wi-Fi growth

Cisco Systems, in a move cementing the company as a dominant wireless LAN infrastructure provider, has announced a program allowing the leading makers of Wi-Fi client adapters and devices to incorporate key features of its Aironet infrastructure into their reference designs.

The Cisco Compatible Extensions program, a free licensing program, involves Intel, Atheros, Agere Systems, Texas Instruments, Intersil, Marvell and Amtel, the developers responsible for more than 90% of the wireless LAN reference designs on the market today, extending core Wi-fi capabilities to desktop PCs, PDAs, stand-alone client adapters and, eventually, mobile handsets.

“These companies will build some important Aironet features into their reference designs, including full 802.11 standards, compliance with the Cisco Wireless Security Suite and compatibility with our scheme assigning wireless LAN clients to virtual LANs,” said Bill Rossi, vice president and general manger of Cisco’s Wireless Networking Business Unit.

Rossi said these capabilities are being licensed through the Cisco Compatible Extensions Version 1 release, for which Intel was Cisco’s chief partner. An expanded Version 2 release will follow in the next 30-60 days, and will include new wireless LAN management and roaming capabilities, as well as new security protocols based on the 802.1X security standard, such as Cisco’s own LAN Extensible Authentication Protocol (LEAP).

Rich Redelfs, president and CEO of Atheros, said his company’s multi-band 2.4 Ghz/5 Ghz PC card design was the first reference design to be approved for the Cisco program, and that the program will greatly increase the pace of adoption for dual-band devices.

Other elements of the Cisco Compatible Extension program include interoperability verification testing between the Aironet infrastructure elements and the client adapters and devices that result from the licensing agreement. In addition, Rossi said the companies involved in the program will promote a “Cisco Compatible” brand that will be used in marketing by all of the companies, and may ultimately include “Cisco Compatible” stamps on the products themselves—a practice redolent of Intel’s wildly successful “Intel Inside” branding campaign.

Rossi said the growing acceptance of Wi-fi in the enterprise, but persistent concern about Wi-fi security shortcomings, is what ultimately drove Cisco to organize the program. He said Cisco is hoping to encourage the proliferation of Wi-fi client adapters and devices while staying true to its core infrastructure business. The company is not aiming to supercede standard developments and security protocols before they are approved by the IEEE, he said.

Chris Kozup, senior research analyst at META Group, who was on the Cisco webcast announcing the new program, said enterprises have traditionally postponed Wi-fi adoption for security reasons, but are beginning to increase deployment as they add new users and office to their enterprises.

Peter Hortensius, general manager at IBM’s Personal Computing Division, said the Cisco program and the vendor giant’s openness in supplying access to its technologies will help accelerate enterprise Wi-fi deployment. IBM already includes Aironet-compliant capabilities in some of its ThinkPad notebook PCs.