NEW YORK-3Com Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., which entered the wireless market with the advent of the high-speed 802.11b data standard, has made available commercially two of three parts of a product suite for providing wireless local area network coverage.
The company is now selling its 11 megabits per second Wireless LAN Access Point 6000, which serves as a broadcast antenna attached by wireline to the Internet. Each unit has a list price of $599.
The company said the Access Point can be installed in one minute and does not require a separate power line to access points. It protects the network against unauthorized intrusion by generating a unique, 128-bit encryption key for each user at the beginning of each session. The Access Point also automatically assigns valid Internet Protocol addresses to users even as they roam across router boundaries.
In late July, 3Com will make available its 11 MBPS Wireless LAN building-to-building bridge at a list price of $1,095. The bridge will connect sites that are difficult to wire, provide temporary LAN access from different sites or allow different buildings within a campus setting to transmit data to each other.
In March, 3Com began selling its 11 MBPS Wireless LAN PC Card with `XJACK’ receiver antenna. This is installed inside laptop computers to provide them with wireless LAN access capabilities.
Asked to compare the characteristics and competitiveness of the 802.11b and third-generation wireless, Rick Bilodeau, senior director of marketing integration for 3Com, said he believes consumers will find each useful in their own ways, as is the case today with wireline, cordless and mobile phones.
Compared with 802.11b, 3G will offer data connections that are ubiquitous and reliable but slow. By comparison, 802.11b will offer Ethernet data speeds in limited “hot spot” areas, like airports, hotels and shopping malls, he said.
