HP Improves Wireless Network Performance

The new HP offerings make use of an advance in wireless networking that allows devices to transmit using three data streams instead of two. According to Roger Sands, director for mobility solutions in the HP networking group, this allows more devices to be connected to the network simultaneously, or IT organizations can opt to reduce the number of access points they need to support an existing set of mobile users. In addition, Sands says HP has developed new algorithms for the access points that also contribute to improved performance.

With the rise of mobile computing, however, Sands says HP expects that IT organizations will be looking for ways to more cost effectively support more end users, many of which will be trying to access bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications.

To that end, the new HP offering supports up to 15 concurrent high-definition videoconferencing sessions on the network, compared with earlier 802.11n offerings that supported only 10. To facilitate this traffic, the new HP wireless access points can be configured with 5GHz radios to provide a maximum amount of bandwidth per access point.

The dual radio, two-spatial-stream MSM430 access point is priced at $699, while the dual-radio, three-spatial-stream MSM460 and MSM466 are priced at $999.