ADTRAN's purchase of Bluesocket is producing some good waves in the education vertical with a recent win in which St. John's Prep in Boston deployed the company's virtual wireless LAN (vWLAN), which runs on VMware and Bluesocket series 1800 access points campus wide. The campus is 175 acres and serves 1,200 students.
The key reasons cited by St. John's for adopting the new ADTRAN solution:
* Projected increase from supporting 100-200 devices now to 1,500-3,000 devices in a few years
* Easy access for BYOD devices
* Secure access for school-owned devices
* Support for multicast/Bonjour (Apple protocol) for wireless A/V projection
St. John’s represents a new customer, but the anticipated solution for addressing ADTRAN's existing customer base has also materialized in the form of a new access point (AP). The existing NetVanta WLAN 150 AP supports 802.11 a/b/g up to 54 Mbps, and the embedded NetVanta controller found in the product line supports up to 24 APs. Customers can add the new ADTRAN access points—NetVanta 160/161--to existing NetVanta gear and continue to use 24 APs per controller; or they can or migrate to an appliance or VMware solution that serve as centralized control.
These new NetVanta 160 and 161 wireless access points are capable of supporting dual 802.11n radios up to 600 Mbps (300 Mbps per radio). The NetVanta 160/161 APs are the first NetVanta products to be integrated with technology developed by Bluesocket, the WLAN company that Adtran acquired last year. The NV160 is an internal antenna (antennas covered) and the NV161 is an external antenna (antennas exposed).
Customers have the option of upgrading the NetVanta 160/161 to the complete Bluesocket architecture to better scale wireless access for the employees and use a single controller (Free VMware-based software), or they can purchase an optional Intel vWLAN based appliance in lieu of using VMware. The NV160/161 is upgraded to Bluesocket architecture by purchasing a software license. This upgrade essentially turns the NV160/161 into the same AP as the Bluesocket 1800 series access point.
ADTRAN has provided a migration path that allows customers to retain their existing investment in 802.11 a/b/g and to easily address expansion and new deployments of 802.11n with or without the Bluesocket vWLAN. ADTRAN is penetrating new spaces in the enterprise, offering a greater breadth of coverage in scalability and touting its ability to offer migration from controller-based WLAN to virtual control with vWLAN while retaining AP investment.
