Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Blades cut wireless and mobile enterprise costs

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 06:38:21 -0400

Blades cut wireless and mobile enterprise costs
Wednesday 27th August 2003

Flexible office, hot-desking, hotelling. At the end of the day they all mean the
same thing. You've lost your prestigious office, your decorated cubicle or your
desktop covered with personal memorabilia.  Your company has gained from space
saving, and can move staff between teams more easily. Welcome to the future.

Whilst wireless laptops and an array of wireless access points can go some way to
unwiring the local area network, the problem of the losing a fixed phone extension
is usually solved a more expensive way. Desk to desk phone calls become mobile
phone calls. So the expense saved in desktop real estate ends up being spent on
the mobile phone bill.

There are ways to address the mobile voice call problem with clever exchanges,
where deskless employees log in to the fixed phone they find on their desk. It's
still not as easy as using the mobile, so yet other solutions tackle the cost of
intra office mobile use with micro cells and operator deals. In-building mobile
call quality can suffer due to the larger number of users compressed into the
space or nearby motorways with large number of phone users. Building structures
can also interfere with signals, so in building cells and repeaters can be used to
address those problems too.

On the face of it, that's what Nextel and RadioFrame Networks announced this week.
However their solution goes much further and deals with how increased in-building
mobile phone use goes hand in hand with wireless LAN usage. This can become
difficult to manage in a cost-effective way, and then there's the problem of
standards evolving so fast that existing investments become obsolete far too
quickly. The RadioFrame Networks solution is based on an architecture of Base
Unit, Airlink Chassis Units and RadioFrame Units (RFUs).

The Base Unit connects back to the network operator and into the enterprise local
area network. The Airlink Chassis Units link via standard category 5 cabling to up
to eight RFUs. These are small wireless racks about the size of a shoebox, which
can be mounted within a building to provide coverage for wireless LAN and mobile
phone networking.

Each RFU can contain up to seven low-power transceivers, or RadioBlades, each of
which is a radio channel for a mobile protocol. The plug and play architecture
allows additional 'blades' to be added to increase capacity, or new blades to
support new standards as they emerge. There are blades for 802.11b wireless LAN,
Motorola's Integrated Dispatch Enhanced Network (iDEN) and GSM. In addition to
flexible network support, RadioFrame Networks provide a management system so that
the mobile radio networks and access points can be centrally managed.

The combination of a managed in building cellular mobile coverage plus wireless
LAN will become increasingly important as employees become mobile within their
office as well as on the road. The ability for operators, like Nextel to be able
to offer a service for all the wireless needs of their customers is very
compelling. RadioFrame Networks have managed to combine two separate wireless
growth areas in one very operator and enterprise friendly architecture.
One last thought - imagine the value of this approach applied to public
hotspots...

http://www.it-analysis.com/article.php?articleid=11184

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