3G & WLANs : Competing or Complementing

US : Chantry Networks, the provider of the world's first routed wireless LAN solution, participated in this week's IEEE 2003 International Conference on Communications. Chantry's co-founder and executive vice president for product operations, Brian Collie, was a panelist discussing "3G & WLANs: Competing or Complementing" at the conference, which draws an international audience from large-scale enterprises, national and international carriers and communications technologies providers.

Inset is Brian Collie who gives the panelists view.

"Brian Collie's expertise in the wireless industry made him a valuable contributor to the panel," said Mehmet Unsoy, former vice president and chief architect for mmo2 and chair of the panel. "Chantry's recent launch of the BeaconWorks WLAN architecture is further proof of Brian's insight into the trends in today's dynamic wireless market."

The panel examined the positioning of WLANs as a complimentary technology to public wide-area wireless networks. In addition to Collie and Panel Chair Unsoy, other panelists included Mark Grayson, Consulting Engineer, Cisco, U.K.; Carl Panasik, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, TI, USA; and Rajeev Chand, Senior Equity Analyst, Rutberg & Co., USA.

The presentations included an overview of Chantry's VNSWorks™ (BeaconWorks™ Virtual Network Services), which enables organizations to create separate, protected virtual networks from a single physical WLAN infrastructure by providing unprecedented network configuration, management, security and control possibilities that are essential in large-scale WLAN deployments. Since it allows organizations to create multiple virtual networks over a single WLAN infrastructure, BeaconWorks is an idea solution for carriers. The virtualization inherently enables not only separate networks for traffic, but also provides a logical separation for billing purposes.

BeaconWorks also addresses many other key requirements carriers have for WLANs, including the ability to scale to literally tens of thousands of access points (BeaconPoints™), while providing centralized administration through the BeaconMaster™ controller. Additionally, the BeaconWorks solution provides for high availability services by eliminating single points of failure - a truly business critical issue for carriers.

Chantry's BeaconWorks, launched on April 21, 2003, has received positive coverage in many media outlets, including 802.11Planet, The Boston Globe, Communications Design, Computerworld, EE Times, eWeek, InformationWeek, Mass High Tech, Network World, PlanetAnalog.com and Unstrung. Its successful unveiling at this year's Networld+Interop tradeshow included being selected as a finalist for the "Best of Interop" awards in the Wireless category.

About IEEE International Conference on Communications

The 38th annual IEEE International Conference on Communications is taking place May 11 - 15, 2003 in Anchorage, Alaska. The conference attracts many of the world's top engineers and scientists, who participate in customized symposia, paper presentations, tutorials, workshops and panels. This year's keynote featured Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who created the basic principles of packet switching, the technology that makes the Internet possible.