Wi-Fi Needs To Be Over-Provisioned
Wireless LANs have to get directional to handle the flood of mobile devices, argues Dirk Gates of Xirrus
Enterprise wireless LANs – the co-ordinated devices which cover whole office buildings – are about to face a tsunami of demand, as users bring tablets, smartphones and other devices into the office. Despite this, the products available are looking very dull.
Most Wi-Fi LAN vendors are selling more or less the same options – centralised switches exemplified by Aruba’s kit, which is massively similar to Cisco’s, and also to the Trapeze products which are being acquired by Juniper.
There are other companies. Meru has a different take with its “blanket” Wi-Fi, and Aerohive has distributed the controllers.
The quiet man of Wi-Fi
Xirrus, meanwhile, has been the quiet man of Wi-Fi, with its strange looking giant disks, each of which contain several Wi-Fi radios. For the last six years, it’s showed up at trade-shows and had remarkably little to say for itself.
The CEO, Dirk Gates, wants to change that. On a visit to London, he told me that – surprise surprise – of all the possible Wi-Fi architectures, Xirrus has the one that will handle the smartphone flood.
But first, the obligatory background. Xirrus is formed almost entirely from the management of Xircom, a company which made PC cards in the 1980s and 90s.
“We’ve gone from little tiny PC cards to flying saucers,” says Gates. But it’s not that big a jump since Xircom’s cards included early Wi-Fi NICs.
Xircom was founded in 1988, grew to $500 million a year, and at the height of the Internet bubble in 2001, Gates sold it to Intel for $748 million in 2001 – ” just as the bubble was bursting,” he says.
A couple of years later, at the beginning of 2004, “we had the opportunity to get the band back together,” says Gates.
That makes it all sound a bit rock-and-roll but Xirrus hasn’t really been that exciting, from what I can see. While it has bubbled along in the background, other Wi-Fi start-ups like Aruba have made all the noise.
Gates raised $80 million in venture capital, claims to be turning a profit, and tracking towards $70 million turnover. Compared to Xircom’s $500 million revenues, that’s not very exciting.
If Gates is reforming a “band”, it looks a bit like Jefferson Starship coming back and playing folk clubs, I suggest, but he’s got big plans.
