Colubris Networks of Waltham, MA, this week announced the release of two new wireless multiservice controllers, the first products that will take advantage of the company’s vision for a Unified Services Network (USN) architecture, essentially a WLAN switch setup where the access points are not thin but retain all their intelligence and that will bring wired and wireless together under one umbrella.
Part of the company’s InMotion line (standing for ‘intelligent mobility’), the controllers are the InMotion MultiService Controller 5500 (MSC-5500) for large deployments and the MSC-5200 which is more for small businesses or branch offices. The 5500 will run up to 200 Colubris InReach APs and features gigabit Ethernet; the 5200 up to 25 and comes with two 10/100 Ethernet ports. The 5500 will sell for $16,000 and the 5200 for $4,800. The 5200 will actually have two flavors, the full version and another that supports just public/guest access services.
The company says a key differentiator of the new products is the TriPlane distributed architecture for management, which the company claims provides five times the scalability over competitive WLAN switch architectures. It centralizes control of QoS, security, roaming and configuration.
“We put the control and management in one place, and distribute everything else,” says Colubris spokesperson Bob Olson. “We think that’s the better architecture.”
Michael Welts, vice president of marketing at Colubris, says, “Not only are these our first multiservice controllers, they pave the way for a new platform for next generation applications.”
Colubris is shooting for a fully unified wired/wireless system for sometime in 2006.
Colubris is also joining its competition- Trapeze and Meru- in chumming the waters surrounding the recent announcement that Proxim is selling its business. Colubris will offer a series of rebate programs to current Proxim customer or those who were thinking about buying more Proxim products, and discounts on the InCharge Network Management System, which Colubris says has been able to control Proxim APs for two years now.
