WLAN traffic analyser

VeriWave released a product that constitutes a brand new LAN testing concept in the 802.11 world: a suite of traffic simulations modelled on the actual traffic patterns of individual vertical industries, according to Enterprise IT Planet.

WiMix Real World Traffic Tests, as the suite is called, intends to help predict how specific equipment and network configurations will perform when turned up in live environments. It is available for healthcare, education, office building, hot spot environments, government, and law enforcement.

The idea is to throw all of the likely forms of WLAN usage into the mix - e-mail, Web, audio and video file transfers, corporate data applications, voice, and the like - and measure the overall quality of experience.

A recently published report from Dell'Oro Group forecasts the total wireless LAN (WLAN) market will exceed $8 billion in five years, driven largely by strong growth in the enterprise segment, reports eChannel Line.

The enterprise segment comprised roughly 30% of total WLAN market revenue in 2006 and is expected to command almost 40% by 2011.

"Some vendors have already announced enterprise-class Draft-N access points, but we don't expect much Draft-N volume to impact the market until mid-2008 and later," said Elmer Choy, senior analyst of Wireless LAN Research at Dell'Oro Group.

Implementing networks with the emerging Internet Protocol Version 6 standard will take substantial preparation, including training developers and IPv6 administrators charged with provisioning office applications, reports PC World.

"We've found a gap in the knowledge of administrators and IPv6 developers. There's a learning curve in setting up these environments," said Erica Johnson, the IPv6 consortium manager at the independent InterOperability Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Johnson's team discovered the knowledge gap during a recent test of IPv6 with 13 vendors' applications, including Adobe Systems' Dreamweaver and Microsoft's MeetingPlace.