November 29, 2004
UNIVERSITY OF UTAH'S MARRIOTT LIBRARY ADDS TRAPEZE NETWORKS MOBILITY SYSTEM TO GIVE STUDENTS WIRELESS ACCESS
PLEASANTON, Calif. — Nov. 30, 2004 — Trapeze Networks, maker of the award-winning wireless local area networking (WLAN) Mobility System™, today announced that the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library, a five-floor 495,358-square-foot building, has upgraded its first-generation WLAN to a more secure and robust solution from Trapeze Networks.
Chris Hessing, head of networking for the library on the University of Utah campus located in Salt Lake City, has been testing and working with fat access points from a couple of incumbent wireless vendors since 2000. After dealing with terrible support and an unusually high number of access point (AP) failures, Hessing decided to take a look at over a half dozen other wireless vendors' products before deciding on Trapeze.
Hessing's goal for the Marriott Library is to provide access to anyone associated with the University. So far he has provided access to 2,000 students on all five floors of the library who use the WLAN for everything from getting onto the Internet with their laptops or PDAs to conducting stock trades, playing games, and of course working on homework.
By next year he plans to provide enough wireless access so that the entire campus of up to 60,000 users can jump onto the network within the library whenever they want. He also plans to evaluate voice over wireless capabilities within a year.
"Trapeze has a solid product with the best support infrastructure and feature set I've tested," Hessing noted. "I like how Trapeze architected its products. The Mobility System gives me granular control over security settings, and is easy to configure and scale. Trapeze also does the best job of providing fine-grained control over encryption settings. Some equipment has certain encryption settings enabled, with no way to disable them."
Hessing is a long-time advocate of 802.1X technology. He is the lead developer on the Open1x project started by the University of Maryland with the goal of creating an open source end-to-end 802.1X implementation. In this case, end-to-end includes the RADIUS server, the authenticator, the 802.1X authentication that the Trapeze Mobility System supports, and the supplicant, or client, that is installed on end-user machines.
The Open1x project is probably best known for Xsupplicant, which is the project that Hessing works on in his spare time. The Open1x project also includes interoperability testing with different vendors' products.
"I've worked with almost every type of enterprise wireless gear, and I must admit that Trapeze products are by far the best," continued Hessing. "What I appreciate most is that Trapeze spent a lot of time designing its gear to support 802.1X. They accomplished that early on and continue to lead in this area."
About Trapeze Networks
Trapeze Networks delivers the power of business applications and services to the mobile enterprise workforce. The company's wireless LAN Mobility System enhances productivity, introduces new efficiencies and accelerates business response time by delivering secure mobility to users, pre and post deployment planning and management tools to IT, and seamless integration between wired and wireless. In the first four months of shipping its WLAN Mobility System, Trapeze has been the recipient of five industry awards in recognition of its product and technology strength. Founded in March 2002, Trapeze raised $50 million in venture funding to date and is headquartered in Pleasanton, Calif., U.S.A. For more information, please visit www.trapezenetworks.com.
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