InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
April 3, 2000
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Like Cabletron's RoamAbout series, Lucent's WaveLAN products are also the base platform for Apple's AirPort product line.
With competitive pricing and solid management, Lucent made an excellent first impression. This was mitigated later, however, when we dug a bit deeper into its security features.
Similar in design to the RoamAbout, the WaveLAN access points have the same heavy, thick wall-mounting brackets and also require you to install a wireless PC Card NIC into each access point.
What's a bother is how Lucent forces users to configure access points remotely by initially using a supplied Message Authentication Code address for identification rather than allowing configuration via a serial interface. As the WaveLAN is aimed at larger accounts, this could be a headache to organize.
On installation, the WavePoint access point immediately requests an IP address from a Bootstrap Protocol server. Unfortunately, it can't get one from a DHCP server.
Even though we were reviewing shipping products, Lucent neglected to include its WaveManager/AP management software.
Things got interesting when we started digging into security, prompted by rumors about wireless security breaches using the AirPort devices at a recent trade show. What we found was that by default, the Lucent WaveLAN cards set their Extended Service Set Identification to "Any," and browse the network for any properly configured WavePoints. Upon finding one, they sync their ESSIDs with the closest access point.
It turns out, though, that they'll do this for any wireless access point, including the ones being installed in airports and convention centers around the country.
As long as "Any" is specified, both the Apple and Lucent cards will browse ESSIDs, and that represents a security risk to network managers. Lucent will need to address this problem if it's going to win points with network managers who've sought to protect their networks simply by keeping their Extended Service Set Identification names secret.
Within a single subnet, we found Lucent's roaming abilities worked very well. Performance was typical for this sector. Throughput generally ran between 5 Mbps and 7 Mbps. Our wandering Web surfer bore this out in testing and even found a seamless drop to 2 Mbps when we moved beyond optimal distance from the access point.
While its management software is slightly less polished than that of 3Com and Cabletron, Lucent's WaveLAN series is nevertheless a solid choice in terms of performance, security, and, especially, price.
Oliver Rist is contributing technical editor at InternetWeek and technical director at Grand Central Networks Labs. He can be reached at orist@cmp.com. Additional reporting was done by Brian Chee, associate director of the University of Hawaii's Advanced Network Computing Lab. He can be reached at chee@hawaii.edu.
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