Wireless Connectivity

Broadcom Accelerates Enterprise Wireless Networks

Broadcom Corporation has announced an end-to-end unified silicon and software solution for 802.11n enterprise wireless networks. By combining its industry-leading wireless LAN (WLAN) silicon, switch silicon and networking software, Broadcom provides a complete platform for OEMs to design and bring to market a unified wireless network solution. This highly integrated, low power enterprise WLAN solution enables seamless mobility around the office while delivering the same network management, scalability, security, performance and cost advantages of a wired network.

According to ABI Research, the 802.11n access point market is expected to reach 14 million units by 2014, up from less than a million units in 2008, which translates to a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 105 percent(1). This growth is due to the greater mobility that the 802.11n standard provides in the enterprise, as well as its ability to provide a more robust wireless network that can support numerous Wi-Fi(R)-enabled devices such as VoIP handsets, smartphones, desktop PCs and laptops.

Most enterprise wireless networks in existence today have been grafted onto an existing wired network using an overlay approach in which all WLAN traffic is tunneled to a centralized access controller where it is de-encapsulated and authenticated before entering the wired network. While this approach is workable for 802.11a/b/g networks, it creates bottlenecks in higher bandwidth 802.11n networks because it treats wireless as a special service running over the network rather than an inherent feature of the network itself. For 802.11n-based networks, IT managers need a WLAN architecture that provides maximum bandwidth and capacity without reducing efficiency or straining budgets.

To meet this challenge, Broadcom delivers a new approach that unifies an enterprise's wired and wireless infrastructure and enables an enterprise Wi-Fi network to provide the scalability, automated network management and robust performance that will drive the adoption of 802.11n in the enterprise. This solution includes several new products: the Broadcom(R) BCM56520 unified wireless switch, the Intensi-fi(R) BCM4748 802.11n access point (AP) system-on-a-chip (SoC) with Accelerange(TM) technology, and FASTPATH(R) Unified Wireless Switching (UWS) 6.0 software optimized for unified wireless switching and unified wireless APs.

"While 802.11n improves Wi-Fi performance and expands wireless connectivity into new applications, it requires a new unified network architecture to avoid inefficiencies and traffic bottlenecks," said Martin Lund, Vice President & General Manager of Broadcom's Networking Switching Business Unit. "Our expertise in wired and wireless networks makes us uniquely positioned to address this challenge. Not only are we the first to develop the silicon building blocks necessary for a unified network architecture, we are also the only vendor with software specifically designed to support it. With a unified wireless network, all of the performance, scalability and expense benefits of the traditional wired network are now available to support wireless traffic."

By Wireless News Desk

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