Today most enterprises have separate wireless and wireline networks, but with Bluesocket under its wing, ADTRAN (News - Alert) can now integrate those dual networks into a single, seamless network that can serve any endpoint virtually anywhere. ADTRAN made that point in announcing its acquisition of the virtual wireless LAN company in August. Today it made good on that promise by revealing its vWLAN solution now brings wireline users into the fold.

That means wired ports now can have the same policy as those coming in via wireless, explains Mads Lillelund (News - Alert).

ADTRAN’s purchase of Bluesocket this year moved the company into the vWLAN space. ADTRAN believes the move to 802.11n, the explosion in demand for wireless connectivity, and the adoption of cloud virtualization in enterprise networks created the ideal climate for it to enter the wireless LAN space and, in the process, “reset and redefine the whole wireless LAN industry,” as Gary Bolton (News - Alert), vice president of global marketing at ADTRAN, put it in an interview this August with TMCnet.

The Bluesocket solution leverages virtualization to put control of the wireless network into the data center – either as an appliance or as software running on a VMware server. Placing WLAN control in the data center allows for unprecedented scalability. That’s important in light of the explosion in wireless endpoints and the fact that wireless access has become a must-have not just a nice-to-have capability, meaning that more organizations are now deploying larger numbers of access points. Controlling WLAN networks from servers at the data center also significantly reduces power requirements, Bolton added, and it allows for a more secure overall architecture.

Lillelund this month at an ADTRAN press event explained to TMCnet that while competing wireless LAN solutions tunnel about 80 percent of traffic from access points back to a controller, the ADTRAN solution authenticates traffic at the edge. (And access points talk to each other, so as users more around, the policy related to their connections move with them.) That makes for a more reliable solution, he explained, because the traffic as a result travels on shorter paths, meaning fewer points of potential failure. Because traffic on the ADTRAN/Bluesocket (News - Alert) solution runs at the access point layer, he added, there is zero failover with zero packet loss.

The ADTRAN vWLAN solution is used by 3,000 customers worldwide today, Lillelund said, and ADTRAN’s existing relationships with service providers should help open new customer opportunities for the Bluesocket solution.