Witness Cisco's Aironet acquisition, which closed a little over two years ago. Rumor has it that the day after the acquisition, demand for Aironet wireless LAN products tripled. You might call that the Cisco effect. But the reality of the situation is that Cisco made a smart move in its acquisition of Aironet, which was widely acknowledged as one of the technological leaders in the wireless LAN industry well before the acquisition was announced. Cisco tweaked the product line a bit, first with the Aironet 340 series and then with the 350. While the company didn't introduce anything revolutionary, the product was solid enough to garner Cisco over one-third of the enterprise WLAN infrastructure market, according to data from Synergy Research.

Cisco's next major wireless LAN acquisition was Radiata, a developer of chipsets for the emerging 802.11a industry. In some respects, it was a puzzling move. Yes, Cisco did need to make a move to ensure that it didn't get left behind if 802.11a took off. But Radiata was a chip developer. After depending on Intersil as its exclusive supplier of 802.11b chipsets, why change course and get directly into the silicon game? Cisco now faces the prospect of Intersil as both a competitor and a supplier at the same time.

Last week, Cisco announced its long-awaited next-generation wireless LAN infrastructure platform, the Aironet 1200 series. The company tried to make a big event of it, inviting senior executives and the press to a big rollout event in New York. Unfortunately for Cisco, there's not a whole lot to get excited about here.

Now before you accuse me of being a Cisco basher, let me assert that the lack of excitement is not such a bad thing. This is network infrastructure, after all, and network managers don't sleep better at night when they roll out innovative products based on untested technology on their enterprise networks. Cisco's approach is to go slow, make incremental improvements and maintain profit margins. It's a good strategy.

A dual-mode access-point, the 1200 series follows a design used for many years by Cisco rival Agere; it's also one that Cisco salespeople used to sell against enthusiastically. In fairness to the company, it's not the same kind of dual-mode design that Agere uses. Rather than using PC-Card radios like Agere, Cisco embeds its 802.11b radio while providing an expansion slot for a field- upgradeable radio module. It's similar to my Dell Latitude notebook, in which I installed a mini-PCI wireless LAN adapter by removing some screws from the bottom of the machine, sliding the card in a slot and attaching integrated antenna leads.

The 1200 platform itself is built with lots of horsepower (a 200-MHz PowerPC processor) and an ample supply of memory. The operating system is efficient and refined. While it's a solid upgrade to the existing 350-series platform, it does raise some interesting questions.

First, with Atheros in the process of rolling out its second-generation 802.11a chipset, why do we have to wait until July (at least) to get Cisco's offering? (Radiata was demonstrating its chipsets at NetWorld+Interop almost two years ago.) This doesn't leave me with a tremendous level of confidence. More significantly, is the dual-mode design the right approach? After all, the effective transmission range of 802.11b significantly exceeds that of 802.11a. It doesn't look to me like people will be able to easily replace their 350-series access points, which were designed with 11b transmission characteristics, when they move to 11a.

Cisco also continues to advance the merits of its wireless LAN security architecture, which is built around the 802.1X standard. However, because the system is dependent on the company's proprietary LEAP authentication type, you are effectively locked into Cisco-branded wireless NICs. Do you really believe that Cisco intends to stay in the wireless NIC business forever? Even today, when you purchase notebooks with embedded wireless adapters (like my Dell Latitude), chances are pretty good it will have an Agere NIC in it that is incompatible with the Cisco security system. (IBM is making a big to-do this week about its revamped notebook computer line that the company claims is the first major notebook to have a LEAP-compatible embedded wireless NIC.) And, if you want to purchase a Compact-Flash wireless NIC for your Pocket PC PDA that is compatible with LEAP, where do you turn? Let me know if you can answer that one.

Because Cisco knows its wireless LAN security system is getting a cool reception in the enterprise, the company has begun to promote a VPN solution as an alternative. It's not a bad strategy, either, in the sense that Cisco's VPN products not only work with any vendor's NICs, but they are top-notch (and they have healthy margins, as well). But a standard VPN doesn't really provide all the security services that wireless LAN users need. A number of vendors, including Bluesocket, Columbitech, Ecutel, NetMotion, ReefEdge and Vernier, are capitalizing on these market opportunities.

In the end, the Aironet 1200 series is what it is: a solid, incremental upgrade to Cisco's wireless LAN product line that provides a platform for future innovation.

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