Chipset to cut chunk out of WLAN costs?

By Phil Hochmuth
Network World, 01/24/05

Broadcom this week is expected to announce a multifunction chipset that could lead to a tenfold decrease in the cost of wireless Ethernet switching gear.

With features such as wireless-LAN fast-handoff, security and access point provisioning spun into Broadcom's new silicon, users could expect to see more integrated WLAN/LAN switches at a lower price in the near future. While some analysts say Cisco's recent buyout of Airespace might signal the beginning of the end for the wireless LAN switch market, some observers say the Broadcom announcement might commoditize the market.

"The Broadcom move is a clear sign the market is commoditizing," says Stan Schatt, an analyst with Current Analysis. "What it means is that second-tier companies now can offer very low-cost wireless switches. The guys who are trying to make their living just selling wireless switches like Aruba and Trapeze are clearly on borrowed time."

Broadcom plans to announce its StrataXGSIII LAN switch architecture - the basic guts of a switch, including Layer 2 and 3 processing. Besides 10G Ethernet and IPv6 routing, these chips will support several key features that have come to define a wireless LAN switch. This means any vendor might soon be able to inexpensively build a WLAN switch based on commodity chips, which would equate to lower price tags for enterprise customers.

Broadcom's StrataXGSIII silicon includes hard-coded protocols that could let WLAN switches based on the chip communicate with each other through secure tunneling. This would let the switches hand-off Wi-Fi clients roaming between thin access points attached to different switches without interruption, Broadcom says. These features are based on technology defined by the IETF's Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Point working group.

Other technologies going into the switch chips include embedded 802.1X support for authenticating WLAN users, encryption of WLAN access point control traffic, and extension of 802.1Q virtual LAN support for WLAN connections, which lets individual end users attached to a shared-bandwidth access point to be split up into virtual LANs.

Broadcom is also partnering with NextHop Technologies, a maker of wireless LAN software that handles configuration, management, provisioning and Wi-Fi device detection functions on a network. NextHop purchased the intellectual property of WLAN switch start-up Legra Systems in October 2004. Between the StrataXGSIII chips and NextHop software, Broadcom says it can offer hardware vendors the core components of a WLAN switch.

"We anticipate that [WLAN switch] products built on the StrataXGSIII architecture will be 10 times less expensive, on average," than currently available WLAN switching gear, says Eric Hayes, director of marketing for Broadcom.

According to IDC, Broadcom is the market leader in Ethernet switch silicon with more than 60% market share, followed by such vendors as Intel, Agere Systems and Marvell. Broadcom first introduced WLAN silicon for access points in September 2004.

Most switch vendors use chips from so-called "merchant" supplies, where low prices are key and features are mostly standardized. This lets vendors concentrate R&D spending on developing ASICs and other hardware technologies for their respective core routing gear, where vendors try to differentiate themselves with unique features and outdo each other in performance.

But because the WLAN switch market is focused mainly at the edge - where WLAN clients and access points meet the wired network - the prospect of lower-cost merchant silicon focused on this market could mean trouble for companies specializing in WLAN switching.

Schatt says the commoditizing of WLAN technology could force vendors to focus more on value-add technologies and proprietary technologies beyond IETF and IEEE standards.

Recent Related Stories:

Trapeze upgrade eases WLAN management (Network World)

In 2005, avoid WLAN 'pileups' (Network World)

Cisco nets Airespace for $450m (Network World)

Small firms struggle with WLAN security (Network World)

Bluesocket adds tools for branch WLANs (Network World)

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