Cisco Aironet 350 Series
By Rob Schenk
The Cisco Aironet 350 Series has flexible management options, good integration with Cisco infrastructure products, and several unique features. Also, updating firmware is much easier with the Aironet 350 than with any of the other products reviewed, and this can be accomplished from a local file or directly over the Web. Among the Aironet 350's unique features is a hot-standby mode that offers redundancy protection for failed access points. Also, only the Aironet 350 can be adjusted to limit the size of a given access point's coverage area, known as a cell.
The Aironet Client Utility (ACU) presents real-time statistics, monitors system status, has a diagnostic link test, and helps administrators perform a basic site survey. But its capabilities are limited compared to the products manufactured by Symbol Technologies and the Lucent Technologies enterprise product.
The Aironet 350 doesn't replace the Aironet 340 we reviewed last year, but rather it includes features focused on larger enterprises needing more scalability and stronger security.
Combining other Cisco products with the Aironet 350--specifically the ACS2000 server, LEAP technology, and the RADIUS server--administrators can manage wireless user accounts and centrally create and distribute wep keys on the fly. Configuring the Aironet 350 to authenticate to a radius server, however, required a good bit of troubleshooting and a firmware upgrade. This setup allows easy authentication of clients but is not interoperable with client cards from other vendors.
The Aironet 350 was our top performer, averaging 6.28Mbps throughput using 128-bit encryption, but we did find some strange anomalies. The AP periodically suffered brief connectivity drops, possibly due to beta hardware. When we tested with two PC Cards, performance was impressive. But as we added more PC Cards to the mix, performance of those additional cards degraded significantly. We suspect that faulty capacitor on some of the beta cards may be to blame.
Cisco Aironet 350 Series"
Company: Cisco
Ph: 02 8448 7100
Price: AU$536
Rating
4%
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