Motorola WiNGS It's Way To A New Wireless Architecture: Page 2 of 2

If the environment get's big enough, Motorola's controllers are still in play, sharing management duties that used to belong only to the controller with WiNG 5 APs. Under WiNG 5, central controllers work more as coordinators between the distributed intelligent APs and not as traffic aggregation. The net effect is that each controller can accommodate up to eight times as many access points than they could before, and the importance of the controller to the system as a whole is much diminished given the ability of each AP to function in the control role. Hello, lower cost of TCO.

I've always been impressed with Motorola's AirDefense Infrastructure Management and Network Assurance tools, and was happy to hear from Sinha and Lopez that WiNG 5's sophisticated AP-AP interactions can be demystified when needed for troubleshooting and support. With controller-based systems, data link paths are fairly obvious in comparison to dynamic environments like WiNG 5, so an effective single pane of glass and utilities that can expose the inner wizardry in a comprehensible way are of paramount importance- especially where the same network may be far flung across multiple sites.

WiNG 5 is early on in it's roll out, and Sinha couldn't yet discuss customers who have taken the plunge. But given Motorola's track record with wireless innovation, I would imagine that other vendors will be taking note as the Motorola customer base upgrades to WiNG 5. Controller-based wireless has been a double edged sword over the last several years, and I for one am glad to see the importance of the expensive controllers diminish while feature sets associated with them are retained.