Wireless LAN to spread its wings with new chips

High-speed wireless LAN users may get more freedom and better security as the provider of IEEE 802.11a chips to many equipment vendors
rolls out its second-generation silicon during the next few months.

BY STEPHEN LAWSON, IDG NEWS SERVICE

Chips coming from Atheros Communications Inc. will bring enhancements
such as international support, interoperability with other wireless LAN
technologies and enterprise-class networking capabilities, the company
announced today.

The 802.11a standard provides for theoretical maximum throughput of 54M
bit/sec., several times the 11M bit/sec. top performance of the currently
popular 802.11b equipment. It uses radio spectrum in a different range —
around 5 GHz — whereas 802.11b uses 2.4 GHz. Atheros last year began
providing 802.11a chips to several vendors for building client interfaces
and hubs, or access points. Its customers include NetGear Inc., Intel Corp.,
D-Link Corp., Sony Corp., Proxim Inc. and SMC Networks Inc.

However, the fledgling standard has been confined mainly to the home
market, both because enterprises are taking a cautious approach and
because some high-end features they demand are not available yet with
802.11a, according to Aaron Vance, an analyst at Synergy Research Inc. in
Phoenix.

By the end of the second quarter, Atheros will begin volume shipments of
three new hardware platforms on which vendors can build more advanced
802.11a products, according to Sheung Li, product line manager at Atheros.

The company’s AR5001A client chip set will be able to "listen" to spectrum ranges that have been assigned to 802.11a use in Japan and
Europe, as well as the North American spectrum ranges, so a client can start communicating with an access point outside its home region if
the user travels there.

For security, the chip set will include support for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Temporal Key Initiation Protocol, as well as for
the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard, and will support the draft 802.11e standard for guaranteed quality of service over a wireless
LAN. Atheros’ Turbo Mode technology will let users utilize two channels together for theoretical throughput as high as 108M bit/sec., Li said.

Client nodes based on the AR5001A chip set could be priced similarly to current 802.11a clients that lack the extra features, according to Li.

The AR5001X client chip set will include silicon for the 802.11b and 802.11g standards as well as for 802.11a. The 802.11g standard is a
faster wireless LAN technology that also uses the 2.4-GHz spectrum. Users will be able to roam seamlessly between networks that use any of
the three technologies, as well as between different countries, according to Li.

With this chip set, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Atheros will probably be among the first on the block with a kind of functionality that will be critical
to the success of 802.11a, said Allen Nogee, an analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group/MDR in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"802.11a by itself is pretty limited, at least to start with, because it doesn’t support the 802.11b nodes that are out there," Nogee said. Many
companies have already deployed 802.11b networks and in some cases will turn to 802.11g to get higher speed with backward compatibility.
In some locations, employees also will be able to take advantage of 802.11a, he said.

"If you have an "a-g-b" chip set, then of course you have the best of everything," Nogee said, though the three-way clients probably will
initially be more expensive than single-band systems.

The AR5001AP access point chip set will integrate enterprise LAN features such as virtual private networks, virtual LANs and the IEEE 802.1x
specification for network access control. Along with high-powered AES packet encryption, these features will help protect 802.11a networks
from intrusion or snooping, Lee said.

Although these advanced access-point chip sets may require some software updates after the 802.11e standard is finalized, the new security
capabilities will be welcomed in enterprises, according to Nogee.

"Businesses and enterprises are looking for another way. WEP is not very secure," Nogee said.

Atheros has not yet priced the chip sets, Li said. Atheros expects to start shipping products based on them in the second half of this year.

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