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Point/Counterpoint: Nortel's 'Unwired Enterprise': Page 2 of 3

Dave Molta:
There are a few interesting takeaways. First, it hammers home the downside risk associated with purchasing OEM versions of infrastructure product offerings. That usually ends poorly, in disruption and high cost.

Second, it opens up the whole discussion of integrated vs. overlay designs for Wi-Fi. Cisco has pretty much been the only vendor touting the virtues of integration even though their offerings so far are modest in functionality. Meanwhile, Aruba, Colubris, Meru, Trapeze, and everyone else are touting overlay architectures, and that it's not necessarily such a good thing to integrate controller capabilities into Ethernet switches.

Up until 11n, the overlay strategy, mostly with controllers at the core, had very little downside, but with the 5-10x capacity of 11n, integration looks more appealing from a traffic-management standpoint. Do you really want to route all that traffic back to the core, or does it make more sense to hand off some roaming and security tasks to edge or distribution/aggregation layer switches?

In the end, Nortel has an opportunity to push some WLAN gear through its distribution channels, especially as Wi-Fi assumes a more significant role as a conduit for voice. Fixed mobile convergence is a growth area, and Nortel has some opportunities if it can get it right.

As for the assertion that 11n opens up the enterprise Wi-Fi market, I really don't see that happening. There's still a good bit of motivation for Cisco customers to stay loyal when it comes to Wi-Fi. The latest numbers I've seen show Cisco at about 65% market share. I'd be surprised if that changes a whole lot in the coming couple years.