Foundry beefs up wireless LAN products

Foundry Networks gave their IronPoint wireless line a boost yesterday with the unwrapping of two new infrastructure products and an update to its IronPoint Wireless Location Manager application.

The new IronPoint Mobility RS4000 Radio Switch is a thin access point (AP) that can handle a large number of clients — up to 256 — making it useful for environments such as college campuses that have many concurrent users (such as 300 students in a lecture hall all logging on to the wireless network). It has two 802.11a radios and two 802.11b/g radios

for service to multiple 802.11a/b/g channels.

Scalability was also a driving force behind the new AP150 access point, which supports 802.11 a, b, and g. The AP150 is a single-channel solution, and will intelligently interact with other APs on your network to prevent interference and eliminate the need for an admin to carefully plan out channels when deploying APs.

New updates to the IronPoint Wireless Location Manager 2.02 (WLM) focus on security. The application can now do real-time mapping and scanning of the wireless network and location tracking, helping to sniff out rogue APs. Existing APs act as a sensor network, eliminating the need for a second set of sensors to detect location information.WLM combines the network mapping with location-based access information to detect unauthorized users and send alerts to admins when problems crop up.

All three IronPoint Mobility products will be available in April. The RS400 will be priced at $2,075 for the 180-degree directional antenna and $2,195 for the 360-degree omni-directional antenna. The AP150 is priced at $525. WLM 2.02 is available at a price of $7,995.