Trapeze Networks to Ship Wi-Fi Location Appliance

NEW ORLEANS, LA /PRNewswire/ -- At the HIMMS 2007 Conference and Exhibition -- Trapeze Networks announced they are shipping their new LA-200 location appliance, a device which allows large organizations to find and track valuable assets in real time over their existing Wi-Fi networks. The LA-200 is the latest element of the SmartMobile architecture which implements intelligent switching to optimize traffic flow over the network and reduce bottlenecks. The LA-200 plugs into an organization's existing Trapeze Networks Wi-Fi infrastructure, providing instant real-time location information of all Wi-Fi devices on the network.

"The LA-200 extends Trapeze Networks leadership in the enterprise Wi-Fi market. Now customers can get even further value out of their Wi-Fi networks, tracking valuable assets in real time, and all from one vendor," said Dan Simone, vice-president and chief technical officer at Trapeze Networks.

Location Appliance Performance
Rapid response times and the precision of location reporting are critical factors in deploying real-time location services. Many mission-critical location applications demand immediate and accurate positional pinpointing to within a few meters. The LA-200 accurately detects and monitors the position of thousands of devices across the enterprise. It significantly outpaces competitive offerings as indicated in the following table.

  Trapeze
LA-200
Cisco 2710 Aruba Meru
Accuracy at 10 Meters 99% 90% N/A N/A
Accuracy at 5 Meters 97% 50% N/A N/A
Accuracy at 3 Meters 95% N/A N/A N/A
Average Seek Time 30 seconds 5 minutes N/A N/A
Fastest Seek Time 10 seconds 1 minute N/A N/A
# Devices Tracked 2,000 1,500 N/A N/A

Broad Product Line Available, Open Standards
Trapeze is the only vendor in its class to bring such a product to market and offers the broadest standards-based enterprise Wi-Fi product line in the industry. In-class competitors such as Aruba Networks and Meru Networks have no location appliance in their product line, while Cisco Systems' location appliance depends on Cisco's proprietary Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX) V4 to be present on client devices. By contrast, the LA-200 utilizes open industry standards and works with all Wi-Fi client devices.

"In our effort to continuously improve patient care, we have identified location-based services as the next step in our WLAN services capabilities offering," said Paul Duffy, information systems manager at the Royal Hospitals, Belfast, Northern Ireland. "We are very eager to include the Trapeze Networks LA-200 Location Appliance in our network so we can start offering these valuable new services to our staff of doctors, nurses, technicians, and other employees immediately."

"For many years, we have successfully used the Trapeze Networks WLAN system for our enterprise customers," stated Ivan Andric, networking manager at NetCologne, a leading wireless technology services provider in Koln, Germany. "Now that we have begun to offer location based WLAN services, we are very pleased that we can introduce the Trapeze Networks LA-200 Location Appliance to our enterprise customers."

Smart Mobile Architecture Ensures Application Scalability
Smart Mobile provides the industry's most scalable location tracking services, enabling organizations to deploy across the enterprise without fear of crippling the performance of other applications, or compromising future voice over Wi-Fi deployment. Unlike any other Wi-Fi based location solution, Trapeze delivers reliable real-time positioning data without causing additional load on the WLAN controller -- all made possible through Smart Mobile's intelligent switching architecture which enables network administrators to optimize the performance of location based applications through distributed switching.

Faster, Cheaper, and More Accurate than Passive RFID
By utilizing an organization's existing Wi-Fi networking infrastructure, the LA-200 enables the implementation of location tracking services faster and for lower cost because no new infrastructure needs to be installed. The Wi-Fi location services approach is also much more accurate because it reports the location of the Wi-Fi enabled device in real-time as opposed to passive RFID which reports only a "last seen" status of the asset being tracked.

Broad Partner Ecosystem
Trapeze is partnered with location services technology leaders including Newbury Networks, PanGo, AeroScout and Ekahau to ensure a complete location tracking ecosystem. Allowing rapid deployment alongside asset management, workflow, resource-planning, and network management applications, the Trapeze solution includes useful out-of-the-box location tracking tools as well as APIs for custom software integration. Trapeze partners offer additional value-added off-the-shelf business-centric location tracking applications. The LA-200 is compatible with Wi-Fi tags from all of these vendors.

Pricing and Availability
The LA-200 is shipping now. List price is $14,995. The LA-200 can be seen at the HIMMS 2007 Conference and Exhibition, Booth # 2381.