Wireless network companies to watch

Entellium

Entellium, in Seattle, is a hosted CRM vendor founded in 2000. It introduced last week a sales force automation application created with the help of video game designers.

The application, eMobile, was designed from the ground up for mobile or wireless users. Entellium hired professional gamers as part of eMobile's design team. Almost the first step was to throw out Windows GUI conventions.

"The typical Windows Forms interface is in our opinion an obstacle to use," says Paul Johnston, Entellium president and CEO. "We think the No. 1 design criteria is: Be able to use this application with one hand." The inspiration: Apple's iPod.

The application is written in Java and runs on any handset or mobile device with a Java virtual machine. Users connect to Entellium's service over General Packet Radio Service or Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution cellular networks, and log on. They use a thumb wheel on the handset to navigate through a series of carefully designed, nested menus, such as What's New and Today, and drill down into details through nested pick lists.

The application takes about 400K to 500KB of memory. It can cache a certain amount of data locally. If the connection drops, eMobile is smart enough to know whether an update completed and if not, to finish it when the link is restored.

NewLANS

NewLANS is developing technology that will deliver multi-gigabit WLANs. That's multi-gigabit. That means creating a wireless link to the client PC that's comparable in every respect to a Gigabit Ethernet wire.

The company proposes to use 7 GHz of unlicensed spectrum in the 60-GHz band. The spectrum was freed by the FCC for this purpose a few years ago.

The company was founded by Dev Gupta, and very few details of its backing or development are public. In various research papers, company officers outline the development of media access control and physical layers for the 60-GHz band, and note that together these layers can support a wireless network that seamlessly spans outdoors and indoors. Small, smart antennas will improve network reliability significantly for the gigabit WLAN.

A new wireless infrastructure architecture will have to be developed for the enterprise, according to one paper. A key element will be an aggregator, a Layer 2 device that will terminate wired connections from the new access points and sit in the enterprise data center. That will eliminate the wiring closet switches needed for today's 802.11-based WLANs, according to the paper.

The aggregator also will control and manage the wireless clients and coordinate load balancing among the access points.

NewLANS is not alone. Extricom and SiBeam are also reportedly aiming at gigabit wireless.