Phil Mayers wrote:
Nortel (untested)
Are Notel still in buisiness ? I heard they invested heavily in mobile interweb and went bust.
No, they're still in business. The products we looked at recently are fairly new.
Thats good to know, they used to be pretty big players in the UK. I know there big UK research centre/hq near Harlow closed down a few years back. Quite sad really.
You really want to be looking for a few key differentiators such as:
* can the device support 802.1x & mac-based fallback at the same time?
Yes !!! The issue that I have with most of the current switches, is that they can't fallback to mac based auth...
Really? I didn't do the testing personally, but I'm fairly sure most of the ones we tested did support it.
Certainly 3Com, Cisco and Extreme do.
Unfortunately we didn't really have a choice, as all the 300 odd deployed edge switches were HP, and there was no way we would get funding to replace them all. Also previous experience with both 3Com and Cisco , saw them both removed permanently from our proffered suppliers list.
* if so, can it assign separate untagged vlans to each client? * can the device assign IP ACLs from Radius replies? * can the device assign 1 untagged and >1 tagged vlans (think wlan aps)
I don't think many will allow you to assign multiple tagged VLANS, most centre around assigning one untagged VLAN... though that would be a very neat feature.
Extreme can.
Well extreme looks like a good bet then. Though it looks like all their wireless stuff is centrally managed, which is probably why we didn't investigate them.