Hitoshi Takanashi, chief technology director at NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratory, Palo Alto, a division of NTT America, says that before installing the Vernier Control Server and Access Manager for its WLAN, the company had weak access control for its 25 engineers, who use a mix of IBM ThinkPad and Sony Vaio laptops within the company building. "Our access control was based on hardware identifiers to the access points," he says. "It wasn't good enough. We were worried about outside access." NTT MCL has had 802.11b equipment from Avaya (formerly Lucent Technologies) and Cisco Systems in place for more than two years, and is currently looking at upgrading to 802.11a technology. The company installed a beta version of the Vernier Control Server last summer and currently uses it for access control. The Control Server sits on the network and centrally manages authentication for all wireless users, coordinates all Layer 3 roaming, and enforces policies and user privileges. The Access Manager sits at the edge of the network and connects access points, enforces pre-configured user rights for authenticated users, enables roaming, and acts as a termination point in order to secure all traffic with wireless devices. Authorisation on campus The University of Texas at Dallas, with approximately 12,000 students, was also looking for WLAN access control when it was introduced to Bluesocket. "We use the Bluesocket solution as an authorisation tool between the wireless cloud from the student's apartments and the campus backbone," says Doug Jackson, director of technology customer services at UTD. On the campus, UTD currently has about 100 WLAN access points, a mix from http://www.symbol.com/products/ Symbol Technologies and Avaya, and uses the WG-1000 Wireless Gateway from Bluesocket to separate the student WLAN cloud from the campus network backbone. The university currently owns two wireless gateways; one serves as a hot spare. Bluesocket's product architecture is based on a single-box solution that sits between the WLAN access points and the wired LAN. The solution was implemented last summer in one of the school's new student apartment buildings which houses 530 students. By March, the school hopes to purchase another WG-1000 wireless gateway to serve almost 800 students in three more apartment complexes. At UTD, authorised wireless users have access to the campus LAN and servers for access to library databases, software archives, course management tools, and the Internet. "Before buying the Bluesocket product we talked about other ways of doing access control like authenticating users by MAC (Media Access Control) address, for example, but the other alternatives were a hodgepodge solution. Bluesocket, on the other hand, is easy to manage," says Jackson. While WLAN access control is the predominant need at both NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratory and UTD, both organisations have a strong interest in deploying other product features, as well. UTD's Jackson reports that he's currently testing Bluesocket's bandwidth management feature to assure that users have equitable amounts of bandwidth. He's also excited about the VPN feature over wireless which he plans to test in the near future. UTD currently relies on WEP. NTT's Takanashi says that mobility support is one of the more important features in Vernier's product. The mobility feature allows users to seamlessly roam between subnets while maintaining service, according to the vendor. This feature is a great improvement upon the 802.11 standard which requires all WLAN users to be in the same subnet or lose their network connection, says Takanashi.