Or at least it does when you are designing a workable wireless LAN for commercial, industrial and public service environments. The Extricom response is really, really big access points:
For example, try thinking about piping music into 20 rooms. Traditional managed wireless would set up an all-in-one stereo in each room and then use a complex system to coordinate them so they played the same tune at the same time. Extricom would have one stereo unit, with speakers cabled into each room. Simple!
The key-limiting factor for every wireless solution is the legally demarked bandwidths available to broadcast its signal. Within the 2.4 GHz band there are only three channels you can broadcast on where the signal does not interfere with the others. For example if this was radio stations, you could only fit three in before you would hear the stations talking over one another.
A wireless access point has a radio in it, and this radio broadcasts on one of the available channels, allowing devices to find, connect and network through it. If you want to put another access point next to it, the access point has to use a different channel so devices don’t get confused about where the signal is coming from. A bit like a contestant on a game show getting muddled with the audience all shouting different answers at the same time. This is the same case for the third access point, until you reach the fourth where you have to return to broadcast on the first channel you used (because you have run out of the three you have available). Therefore these access points cannot be sited next to one another. Managed wireless LANs have come about to coordinate this radio frequency issue and allow simpler management to the configuration of these devices.
Some managed solutions of this style go a step further and interfere with the IEEE standards, stripping off acknowledgments from packets to allow small clusters of access points to broadcast on the same channel. These are additional layers of processing that need to be coordinated by a controller located elsewhere within your LAN, the same LAN already carrying all your other network traffic.
Extricom decided to completely bypass all of these issues by just making their access points really big. A ball of coverage with a radius of up to 200 meters and an ability to accept over 2000 + simultaneous connections big, that’s how big we are talking. To achieve this they have found a way to distribute the radios/antenna at the end of Ethernet cable runs of up to 200 meters. An access point can support up to 32 distributed radio/antenna points creating a continuous blanket of coverage. A blanket of coverage with guarantees; a guarantee on the air rate of the wireless access and a guarantee of data transfer back to the network. Things that the other managed WLAN systems cannot guarantee because the placement of their access points and the physical LAN sit outside their control, so you see, size does really matter.
This big access point system also allows you to have up to 4 radios on each of the distributed radios/antenna points. So you can broadcast networks on all three of the 2.4GHz channels and the 5GHz channel at the same time, giving you 4 blanket wireless networks from one big access point, instead of the one network from traditional systems. This is because the available frequency in traditional systems is essentially eaten up or wasted as a management overhead.
Like traditional managed wireless, the Extricom access points can be managed across larger sites, or entirely geographically separate sites, providing full scalability. Also, for those with service continuity priorities, redundancy can be built in with Extricom’s cascade switch technology.
The very nature of the big access point system means that it is impossible to spoof access points into the network, and they are very simple to detect, as Extricom is simple looking for interference. If you try to intercept network traffic on the Extricom Ethernet, you would get a nasty surprise, as it is hardware solution not IP based network traffic.
If you were looking to enable your LAN as a WLAN, would you like to massively increase your number of network access points, or would you like to add a few robust, redundant, guaranteed, managed devices, with all the security hardware securely locked away in a cabinet?
Solutions House are experts in roaming user IT solutions, which are needed whenever your technical devices or your users vary location in-between or during system usage. Roaming users bring with them all sorts of unique issues for IT Managers and their organisations. 
