wireless LAN installations
Wireless LAN that changes everything you expect about wireless
- Easy to deploy and maintain, without the complexities of RF cell planning
- Delivers both seamless mobility and high capacity
- Truly built for the enterprise triple play without performance trade-offs
- Wireless that behaves like wire
Concept
The Extricom Wireless LAN System is based on a simple yet powerful idea: eliminate the concept of cell-planning and replace it with the “channel blanket” topology. The solution allows each radio channel to be used everywhere, on every access point, to create blankets of coverage.
Within each channel blanket there is seamless mobility with no handoff latency, no co-channel interference, robust “wire-like” client connections and the ability to design for a guaranteed and predictable level of service for all users. Separate channel blankets give you the unique option of physically segregating different user types (802.11a, b and g), traffic (voice, data and multimedia) and roles (private and public zones) onto different channels, thereby guaranteeing quality of service.
What’s more Extricom’s patented TrueReuse™ technology boosts system bandwidth up to ten times over that of competing WLANs. All this is achieved without the cyclical and costly RF cell-planning of traditional WLAN. Coupled with zero-configuration UltraThin™ Access Points, Extricom yields the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership.
Extricom users include schools, universities, hotels, healthcare providers, government and industrial enterprises. Whether it is for increased capacity, support for mobile voice or the ability to effectively serve diverse groups of users, each has discovered the radical leap in ease of ownership and uncompromising performance that are the trademarks of Extricom’s innovation.
Solution
The Extricom solution is based on a fully centralised WLAN architecture, in which the switch makes all of the decisions for packet delivery on the wireless network. In this configuration the access points (APs) simply function as radios with no software, storage capability, MAC or IP address. Even the basics of connecting are different: clients associate directly with the switch not with the AP. The AP acts as an “RF conduit” to rapidly funnel traffic between the clients and the switch.
Centralisation of the Wi-Fi environment enables you to deploy 802.11a/b/g channels at every AP, creating overlapping channel blankets. The channel’s bandwidth is delivered across the blanket’s service area (i.e. the combined coverage of all APs connected to the switch), with interference-free operation and consistent capacity throughout.
Within each channel blanket the switch avoids co-channel interference by permitting multiple APs to simultaneously transmit on the same channel, only if they won't interfere with each other. In summary, the Extricom solution eliminates the traditional performance limitations caused by RF cell planning; co-channel interference, edge users, rate adaptation, mixed b/g devices and frequent AP-to-AP handoffs.
