Cisco's Curious Choice For New High-Speed Wireless Bridges: Page 2 of 2

In many ways, Cisco's Airespace acquisition (what is now their lightweight wireless product line) in 2005 still doesn't feel complete from the product integration standpoint. Those of us who lived through it and drive big Cisco wireless networks can't help but wonder if history is repeating itself on a smaller scale with the Exalt partnership.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very much looking forward to up to 162 Mbps of aggregate throughput in a visually pleasing package. At full throttle, it kicks butt over Cisco's existing bridges by a multiplier of 5x. The features in the r5005 rival those in good network switches, including 802.1q VLAN tagging, Ethernet rate limiting and extremely low Ethernet latency. The r5005 even has an integrated 3 port 10/100 switch with one PoE port! Outstanding, indeed. This unit will come in handy for replacing existing links that have gotten too small for what traverses them and will enable contemporary applications like getting networked video cameras in hard-to-cable locations.

But you'll have to manage it outside of WCS, your single platform for wireless management.