Motorola Solutions Communities : All Content - Wireless LAN

PilotHouse Says We’re Steering WLAN in the Right Direction

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:31:05 GMT

It is always good to hear the praise of friends, but we crave critiques from IT decision-makers who use our products to know what we’re doing right or wrong. This is a bit of wisdom that applies, in our industry, to winning awards. We’re always glad to receive awards from industry groups, but when those awards are based on actual user response and opinions, we are very eager to read the results.

Nemertes Research PilotHouse Awards focus on WLAN technology as rated by the IT decision-makers who buy, use and maintain it. In fact, the award is based 100 percent on the views and experiences of actual users, who provide benchmarking information directly through interviews and surveys. Nemertes Research doesn’t seek sponsors for their awards program and their research is conducted independently.

The spirit of the award is best described here:

While IEEE 8022.11x standards are set in stone, vendors choose to differentiate themselves in a variety of ways, including architecture, management tools, and security, antennae, and advanced routing features. IT professionals who use these products rate their providers on technology, value and customer service.

Motorola was in the Market Leaders category with Aruba and Cisco, beating out the competition with an overall score of 4.15 out of a possible 5.

Technology, Customer Service and Value

Nemertes Research defines technology as “how IT professionals view the sophistication, features, and performance of the WLAN” and also notes that the ratings reflect the vendor’s leadership role in the industry. IT professionals define technology as the most appealing thing about WLAN solutions, and the IT professionals surveyed felt Motorola’s technology was strong, honoring us with a score of 4.15.

Customer Service also received a score of 4.15, marking “a solid win over Cisco and Aruba in service, making service a significant strength for the company,” notes the 2011 PilotHouse Awards Survey.

We are also humbled to see that IT professionals believe that they are getting a good value from our technology and service packages – in fact, they rated us half a point higher this year over last year, signifying to us that we are on the right track. We cut our teeth in Retail, Transportation & Logistics where cost consciousness is second nature. With us, Less is indeed More … less Worry, Cost and Congestion … more Trust, Intelligence and Performance.

What it means for us

We are really pleased with the Nemertes Research results. Our teams across the board have worked diligently to develop the right mix of elegant technology, responsive customer service, and fair pricing that won us this recognition. That was the easy part. We realize that we’ll have to match the hard work of earning the trust of technology leaders with the even harder work of keeping it. Over this next year, we can review the Nemertes Research survey results to glean additional insight about our WLAN products, but we’ll also have to continue to talk with the professionals who use our products. We invite you to visit our Nemertes Research PilotHouse Awards page and read the Nemertes Research PilotHouse Award results. Leave us a comment and tell us what you think.

Find out more about our WLAN products.

Employee-owned Smartphones and Tablets in the Enterprise

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:47:44 GMT

Like it or not, WiFi enabled wireless devices are multiplying in your enterprise, as your employees, customers and other visitors bring their Apple iPads, iPhones, Motorola Xoom, and other Android devices into your airspace. Depending on where you work, some of these devices are approved for use while others are not, but there’s no denying that employees increasingly prefer to use their own mobile devices.

As this trend increases, employers are adapting their corporate policies and rules about use of personal devices for work. They’re trying to find the best approach to issues such as how and when it is appropriate to monitor usage or whether or not to compensate an employee for personal device usage. Most importantly, employers are focused on how to make sure their network can handle the traffic these new devices bring, and how to keep their network safe and secure.

Blending work and home devices
A Motorola survey of IT professionals at enterprises with more than 1,000 employees revealed that 61 percent of employers have seen an increase in employees using their own devices for work-related tasks. And, a recent survey conducted by Citrix Systems, Inc., a company that provides IT as an on-demand service, found that 92 percent of the companies they surveyed reported some workers are already using non-company-issued computing devices for work-related tasks.¹

All of these devices, along with the wireless applications they use, can wreak havoc on your network and create a management nightmare for IT professionals. How can an IT department know what number of tablets, smartphones and other devices to expect on the network, or gauge the amount of bandwidth they might consume? Networks must have the intelligence to deliver the performance that is expected, which becomes more complicated as the number of devices proliferates and their capabilities increase exponentially.

Be prepared for the oncoming traffic
The bottom line: Infrastructure matters, particularly when it comes to network architecture. As device use proliferates, it will also be important to properly configure and optimize wireless LAN performance for all of the different network users. Developing a network that can handle your current needs is important. However, it’s just as important to plan for future growth by choosing options that can easily scale as your company grows and as the number of devices on the network increases with that growth.

This all starts in the planning stage as you configure a network and select the right options to secure and optimize it for the highest performance capabilities. We just published an application brief that provides tips on optimizing performance through the use of channel- and data-rate configuration, Smart Band control, airtime fairness, and Quality of Service (QoS) instruments. It’s all part of our WiNG 5 solution that brings performance, optimization and security to your fingertips.

Read a new application brief that will help you optimize your network for Wi-Fi enabled smartphones and tablets [MC1] . You can also check out more information on our WiNG 5 solutions.

¹IT Organizations Embrace Bring-Your-Own Devices Global BYO Index, 2011, Citrix Systems, Inc.,

When Smartphones Meet WLANs

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 21:23:27 GMT

We are well on our way to becoming a mobility-obsessed society. A recent survey on Smartphone Adoption and Usage by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project suggests that 35 percent of Americans now own a Smartphone. What’s more, they use them all the time for a wide range of purposes.

Continuing innovation in devices, applications and mobile service availability is driving even greater Smartphone adoption further increasing our dependence on mobile networks for the information and services that we use on a daily basis.

Smartphones and the enterprise
As mobility transforms the consumer, it can’t help but transform the enterprise. With the expectation of improving access to information, expanding application availability and broadening service offerings as a backdrop, enterprises are investing in mobile technologies to support the needs of all of their stakeholders.

A major focus of enterprise investment has been wireless networks, or WLANs, that today are used to support multiple aspects of business operations across many industries. For example, consider mobile point-of-sale terminals, remote cameras, public Wi-Fi or inventory tracking devices.

The pairing of a WLAN infrastructure and a collection of potential Smartphone clients – think of customers with Smartphones walking into a store or a restaurant – creates some interesting opportunities. Consider, for example, a retail environment where customer engagement is the key to capturing sales and building loyalty. The opportunity exists for the retailer to provide a service or an offer delivered via the WLAN to a Smartphone, which they customer may find valuable.

Two examples of services delivered over WLAN that build customer engagement which may be delivered over the WLAN are:

Guest access which gives customers access to the Internet allowing them to browse information and access data without using the cellular network.
Location-based services which allows the retailer to engage the customer in real-time with location based loyalty-programs offering promotions, couponing, advertising and other benefits.

Protecting the network's integrity
Of course providing these services comes with its own challenges – two that come to mind are security and privacy. For example, how do you protect the integrity of data and personal user information in a mobile network environment? These are important considerations and providing a secure environment is essential to building trust with mobile users and assuring adoption of the services.

That said, innovation focused on expanding the utility of WLANs to improve customer engagement is inevitable and so far solutions to the problems of sharing and securing the WLAN are keeping up with the pace of that innovation.

The bottom line for enterprises looking for more ways to improve customer engagement – maybe the best way is via the phone.

Learn more about our WLAN solutions and what they can do for your enterprise.

WiNG 5 WLAN Takes Gold in Tolly Group Competitive Test

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:34:24 GMT

Last week, the Tolly Group released results of its competitive comparison test between the WiNG 5 wireless LAN (WLAN) portfolio from Motorola Solutions and traditional hub-and-spoke solutions from Cisco and one other leading vendor. For those of you in the IT space, you know of Tolly as a premiere independent IT test lab.

It comes as no surprise that Tolly found the WiNG 5 distributed intelligence architecture outperformed the other vendors on a number of points. Motorola’s WiNG 5 delivers a fully site-survivable solution – with no loss of service when the network connection to the controller was lost. The other tested products lost functionality such as firewall enforcement, client roaming, authentication, IPS/IDS, and RF interference remediation when connectivity to the controller was interrupted, so when the link or the controller goes down, you are out of luck!

Here’s a summary of the key advantages of WiNG 5 included in the report:

Lower setup and installation time resulting in lower costs
Scalability up to 10,000 access points, 4,000 RF domains, and 100,000 clients
Controller-less deployment operation
WAN link bandwidth performance efficiency

The report confirms what customers using our WLAN solutions have known for some time. Now, it is time for you to check out why WiNG 5 WLAN solutions from Motorola are the less complicated, less expensive way to more capacity, more agility and more satisfied users.

For complete details of the test sponsored by Motorola, download the report for free by linking to:
Motorola WiNG5 Wireless LAN Architecture Advantages: Lab Evaluation vs. Traditional Hub-and-Spoke WLAN Solutions Report

Taking the Pulse of Your Wireless Network

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:38:58 GMT

Your patients expect high quality care, whether they are in your hospital or visiting your medical office. They want reassurance that your staff will know them, their medical history, the results of recent tests and that they will be taken care of, no matter what health issue brought them in. With healthcare costs increasing -- and with more competition in the industry -- quality care is more of a demand than an expectation today. But to meet the demand, healthcare providers need complete, real-time data that can help them identify a life-threatening drug allergy or provide a reliable diagnosis for serious diseases. If you’re a healthcare provider, you need a secure, reliable wireless network with bandwidth to spare. The quality of care you give, your reputation, and your bottom line will depend on it.

Investing in Quality

The benefits you reap by arming doctors and nurses with mobile devices, single or dual-mode VoIP handsets and wireless scanning devices are hard to ignore. These products, along with clinical decision support software, streamline administrative processes so that nurses can spend more time responding to patients’ needs and less time behind their desk. Nurses can bring complete patient data directly to the bedside, make updates immediately and improve collaboration between doctors and other healthcare practitioners. To make all the information flow smoothly, hospitals need intelligent, distributed bandwidth.

Maintaining a Competitive Edge

The more intelligent your distributed network is at the edge, the fewer connectivity issues you’ll experience – which decreases the burden on your IT staff. As user access requirements evolve, your “always on” network will need to keep pace, scaling to accommodate thousands of Wi-Fi device users, Active RFID tags, and additional data-intensive file transfers. Unreliable or dropped wireless sessions mean dropped applications and repetitive logins. With the right investments, you can transform the quality of your healthcare delivery today and tomorrow.

In Pursuit of Always-on Learning: The Digital Classroom

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:13:18 GMT

Children today live in an increasingly wireless world. Social networking, gaming and new devices bring mobile access to a wide variety of video, voice and data content-on-demand. Kids expect to be connected everywhere – even at school. Digital textbooks, one-to-one computing programs and online assessment tools put mobile technology in the hands of the students. These connections depend on a secure and reliable wireless network.

If you are responsible for a school or district network, you are likely evaluating various wireless options. Can they handle the user density and bandwidth-intensive applications your school requires? Does your network support high levels of security? These are questions you should be asking to enable richer learning experiences where teachers and students focus on the curriculum, not the technology.

The Always-on Classroom

An always-on learning environment enables teachers to engage students with transparent use of technology to connect students with digital content in the classroom or across campus.

Always-on learning sets the stage for personalized instruction with an educational path that further develops student strengths while addressing identified weaknesses in the process in every class, in all subjects, at the same time. With the right 802.11n wireless LAN (WLAN) as the foundation, it’s not only possible but easy on even the tightest budgets.

Getting Connected

Twenty-first century education connectivity requires secure, distributed network intelligence to support demanding, dense user environments while providing reliability for online assessment. WiNG 5 solutions deliver on the promise with less equipment. Smarter, more powerful APs handle all the security, quality of service, and routing of data, eliminating bottlenecks, delays and latencies. The innovative WiNG 5 WLAN architecture delivers video sessions that can scale to support more than 100 student connections from a single AP. And, with our new, high-capacity controller the network can support up to 10,000 APs.

Intelligent access enables always-on learning. Are you ready to move your network to the head of the class? Find out more about WiNG 5 solutions.

Interop: From the Show Floor

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 10 May 2011 21:34:03 GMT

Interop is a great opportunity to see how IT is evolving and how Motorola fits into that ever-changing, fast-paced landscape. This year, we’re really happy to see our forward-thinking efforts paying off.

For example, I’ve noticed that a lot of people at the show have heard our announcement about the NX 9000 WLAN NOC Controller, but once they see it in our booth, they raise their eyebrows, surprised by the scale that the NX 9000 can reach. We’re listening to larger enterprises tell us that historically they’ve had independent networks, but now they’re looking to centralize for better security, efficiency and policy consistency. When they see the power and capability of the NX 9000, they get really enthusiastic. One customer explained it as the “light at the end of the tunnel” for his company.

We’re recreating our portfolio because our customers told us about new growing pains as they rely more heavily on their wireless networks. For example, they want flexibility to put a 3G card in for backhaul or for outages. We know that, but we’re also thinking about the problems companies will have as they grow, or as standards change, so that they have less to think about moving forward. It’s something we think about a lot. We believe “Less is More” with the right technology and we are putting those ideas to work in our products.

I’m also hearing buzz about our TEAM VoWLAN solutions. Customers want ubiquitous voice across the enterprise – they want solutions that integrate from the back room to the storefront to serve their entire enterprise, and they want solutions that are fully integrated from network control and devices, to securing and assuring the network -- TEAM delivers on that.

Many customers here at Interop are realizing that we are one step ahead as far as out-thinking our competitors, and that we're anticipating how the enterprise network will evolve.

I really believe our story resonates with the people here at Interop. Customers know our name -- many of them know us personally. It is really satisfying to hear what people are thinking and to know that we're helping them be their best now and in the moments ahead that are most important to them.

Find out more about our WiNG5 solutions.

Achieving True Mobility Takes New Thinking

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 04 May 2011 14:09:37 GMT

When you think about 11n mobility, you likely think in terms of bandwidth. How much do I have? How much do I need? That’s important to consider given the nearly insatiable demand for video and data intensive applications. But are you truly ready for 11n mobility?

The success of your mobility strategy will ultimately be defined by your ability to deliver a wireless network users can trust to get their jobs done effectively and efficiently, with a QoS that matches their expectations. In a highly distributed network, you need more than just a bigger network pipe to make mobility work. You need flexible network intelligence not just at the APs, but also at the controller to manage additional data, video and voice traffic and deliver an uncompromised user experience.

Here’s why. With traditional hub and spoke architectures, wireless controllers can become a throughput bottleneck as network traffic increases, because QoS, security and mobility are enforced there. This causes applications to freeze or time-out during use, interruptions or jitter in video streams, and poor voice quality or dropped calls. It also leads to user frustration. Our WiNG 5 solutions put more intelligence in the access layer, making APs more network-aware so they can route traffic along optimal paths. Full QoS and security are applied directly, avoiding a bottleneck at the controller. The result is better network stability and application performance. (Whitepaper: Distributed Intelligence: The Future of Wireless Networking Architecture)

But we didn’t stop there. We also designed a controller that delivers the bandwidth you need today in an architecture that allows you to scale to meet global requirements tomorrow – up to 10,000 APs anywhere you do business. With centralized management, enhanced security, zero-touch installation and remote troubleshooting, we put the power of true network mobility in your hands.

When it comes to network investments, we believe less is more, no matter your size or global aspirations. The technology exists to change the way you think about mobility, to simplify the complex. Are you ready?

A Wireless Network that Delivers More of Everything but Cost Is Here

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:15:01 GMT

Overseeing a network for a large bank is challenging. Meeting new security initiatives under strict budget constraints means it’s critical to keep a close watch on wireless devices at numerous enterprise locations while still providing reliable access, network control and the right amount of bandwidth to users. As wireless technology evolves, intelligence and security enhancements to wireless networks allow IT managers to breathe a bit easier. For example, these new solutions are helping an IT manager at a major national bank centrally manage a network of 10,000 access points distributed throughout more than 3,000 locations and deliver an enhanced user experience at each branch – while submitting a budget that pleases the boss.

Maintaining a secure network

As network deployments become more widely distributed, centralized management is even more critical. Imagine the challenges faced by a large K-12 school district that needs to provide the bandwidth necessary for an open learning environment, while maintaining a consistent security policy district-wide – all during a time of budget cuts. Giving the district’s IT manager complete visibility of the entire network, a single point of configuration and network assurance means she can be more efficient doing her job while worrying a little less about cost. She can manage complex network configurations with the confidence of knowing that her network is protected with Layer 2 security across the entire broadcast domain.

Of course, no network is fail-proof. This is why it is paramount for integrated multi-level resiliency and spectrum management to be a fundamental aspect of an infrastructure solution. This helps ensure networks survive in the event of failures at the access point, wired switch, WAN link or wireless switch.

Troubleshooting your wireless network from far away

National retail chains depend on their networks for everyday operations. Being able to troubleshoot from a network operations center means the cash registers keep ringing. When a retail outlet in Beverly Hills experiences a dead spot, interference or network accessibility problems, the wireless infrastructure should have the capability to quickly auto-adjust the power and channels for self-healing.

We think it’s important for banks to run smoothly, for kids to learn safely and for shoppers to have a carefree experience. With a greater selection of access points, flexible network configurations, zero-touch installation and a powerful network operations controller from Motorola Solutions, you can get the wireless network you need with less hardware to buy. Our scalable infrastructure options, starting with small, controller-less deployments, to mid-size deployments using virtual controllers, to large global deployments that offer centralized control, let you adjust your architecture as your needs change. And, we’re getting ready to launch more for less with Wing5. Are you ready?

Can We Talk? Collaborating In Real-time With Mobile Devices

noreply@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:04:22 GMT

More importantly, can we connect and collaborate in real-time on mobile devices from the front desk to the stock room? If the answer is “no,” then the time has most definitely come to ask yourself: “why not?”

Solutions that achieve pervasive onsite interoperability transform processes and increase productivity. Imagine a highly efficient workplace where your employee -- regardless of their organizational function or mobile device -- can connect. A store manager with a VoWLAN Smartphone can talk to security using two-way radios to alert them quickly of a suspected shoplifter. A check-out clerk with a VoWLAN badge can immediately contact the stock room to have them check the price and availability of goods. This level of connectivity is available today and is being leveraged not only in retail, but by healthcare and educational institutions everywhere.

Our Total Enterprise Access and Mobility (TEAM) portfolio makes onsite mobility and interoperability possible. TEAM solutions enable you to extend voice -- PBX and Push-to-Talk, and data services -- over the WLAN to on-the-move workers throughout your facility or campus. How could the ability to enable Push-to-Talk communications between multiple, disparate devices, including two-way radios, transform your business? With the right technology investments you can talk, enable new levels of employee collaboration and problem solving, improve worker productivity, provide better, more responsive customer service, increase efficiencies and achieve higher profits. Our flexible, mobile communications solutions make what seems like the impossible a cost-effective, business changing reality. Let us show you how.