HP Flexes Its Wireless Wares

HP is poised to carve out a bigger slice of the growing wireless market with its Mobile Access Solution, the industry's first access points that transmit three data streams per wireless radio as opposed to two, and that can support up to 50 percent more mobile devices than existing technology. According to Dell'Oro Group, overall wireless LAN (WLAN) market revenues are expected to surpass $7 billion by 2014; 2010 revenues were up 23 percent year-over-year to $2.1 billion. During the third quarter of 2010, both HP and arch-rival Cisco grew their enterprise revenues by over 20 percent.

Built around HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy, the Mobile Access Solution is the first dual-radio 802.11n solution with 900 Mbps signaling, delivering up to 15 concurrent high-definition video conferencing sessions on the network, compared with the 10 of prior 802.11n offerings and just one of 802.11g. The company says Mobile Access Solution is 10 to 12 times faster than any current products and 50 percent faster than existing 11n products.

The Mobile Access Solution provides simplified management through a single interface for wired and wireless environments; reduced complexity with a security solution that delivers access control, user authorization, and intrusion detection and prevention for both wired and wireless environments; and lower total cost of ownership and improved price and performance.

The good news for existing customers is that the new line integrates into the existing controller line (700), so customers don't have to do a "forklift upgrade," say company officials.
The solution includes E-Series Multi Service Mobility (MSM) 430, 460 and 466 wireless access points; MSM 5.5 mobility controller software; and Mobility Manager 3.10 network management software. The dual radio, two-spatial-stream MSM430 lists for $699. The dual radio, three-spatial-stream MSM460 and MSM466 list for $999.

This is a significant announcement, says IDC's Rohit Mehra, director, enterprise communications infrastructure, because HP is the first of the WLAN majors that is shipping this capability, and also because this will be the first of many such announcements in the weeks and months to come."While in 2010 we saw the proliferation of single-radio 802.11n APs at the low end of the market, these new APs will help rollout of wireless at the high end of the market, further solidifying Wi-Fi as a critical network infrastructure in the enterprise."

Rohit adds that the announcement both improves HP's market opportunity as well as the potential target market since it expands the high-end segment of enterprise WLANs, the segment that requires a high-capacity, multimedia-capable, resilient wireless architecture.

"2011 will be an interesting year for enterprise networking, wireless included. Cisco still remains a strong leader by far, and will refocus its efforts to ensure it does not lose that leadership. HP, with its combined networking portfolio with 3Com, is now stronger than in the past. The competitive landscape will only get more competitive, from the data center to the network edge, with wired and wireless."

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