TouchPoint Networks Blog Articles

Wireless Infrastructure and Mobility Solutions

April 4th, 2012 by admin

We are living in an increasingly wireless world. Wireless networks are expanding throughout the globe, linking people thousands of miles away, and providing instant on-demand services for people who want them. Businesses are constantly looking for new solutions for wireless business mobility, and new -and often quite costly- ways of updating their infrastructure to keep up.

However, there is a new product on the market that provides solutions for business mobility that allow for impressive scalability at an affordable price. This is ADTRAN's Bluesocket technology, and the vWLAN system it creates.

The central revolutionary idea behind their vWLAN system is to eliminate the need for a central controller machine entirely, instead using a series of “smart” access points that are more capable of managing the network for themselves. This creates a new paradigm for wireless network management that opens up significant new possibilities for large-scale wireless services.

ADTRAN Bluesocket Solutions For Wireless Business Mobility

With Bluesocket, the entire WLAN management is distributed throughout the network itself, giving increased flexibility and control as well as providing increased security and reliability. Here are a few of the benefits in more detail:

Scalability: By moving the network's management onto the network itself, it removes the bottleneck of a central controlling computer. Businesses and other large enterprises were locked into an upgrading cycle, having to constantly replace their controllers and add new ones, until a server farm was needed just to manage all the incoming and outgoing connections.

With the new Bluesocket technology, a single vWLAN system can automatically handle 1,500 access points and 48,000 users. That's large enough to not just cover a single office, but to potentially unify an entire corporation's wireless communications into a single system.

Security: One of the single biggest security problems in a large network was the controlling computer itself. Since it handled virtually all of the traffic and security, it was the automatic target for malicious software and users seeking to subvert the system. Instead, in a vWLAN setup, the only centralized element of the network is the basic traffic control. Everything else is distributed and, therefore, less vulnerable to direct attack.

Cost-savings: While each individual access point costs somewhat more than a traditional wireless router, due to the smart technologies inside it, the overall cost of a vWLAN network is often significantly less than a traditional network. The built-in scalability means that once a Bluesocket network is in place, costly upgrades are rare. There's no more need to constantly spend tens of thousands of dollars on new servers to keep up with growing network demands.

Reliability: Another of ADTRAN's solutions for wireless business mobility is the creation of a distributed network that is far harder to take down. In the old way of building systems, if something happened to knock the controller computer(s) off the network, the entire network crashed as a result. However, thanks to distribution and virtualization, this no longer needs to be the case. In fact, even if virtual machine handling the administration crashed, the vWLAN network can carry on by itself until the controller returns.

Simplicity: Every Bluesocket access point is truly plug-and-play. Once a new access point sees the network, it automatically hooks in and self-configures based on the overall network state. Further, adding more users is solely a matter of adding user licenses into the system.

In short, ADTRAN provides solutions for wireless business mobility that can help any size enterprise create a stable, secure, and cost-efficient network that's immediately future-proof. It creates a new form of network that improves on the old model in nearly every possible way.

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