Agito’s Offers Location-Aware Mobility Router

RoamAnywhere merges enterprise WLANs and IP telephony with cellular networks

• By James E. Powell
• 02/22/2008

Agito Networks, Inc. (http://www.agitonetworks.com) has released an updated enterprise fixed mobile convergence (eFMC) product, the RoamAnywhere Mobility Router, a platform that uses RF-based, location-aware technologies to reliably mobilize and enable voice over 802.11 wireless LANs (VoWLAN) and data applications for no matter what mobile carriers and equipment vendors the customer chooses.

Agito Networks combines 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs), enterprise IP telephony, and the carrier cellular network to improve accessibility and responsiveness, increasing mobile worker productivity and taking full advantage of an enterprise’s 802.11 WLAN deployments as a low-cost alternative to cellular networks for mobility within an enterprise’s building. Using voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) can help an enterprise reduce cellular expenses by up to 60 percent, according to the company. No costly, carrier-specific equipment (needed to address poor cellular coverage) is required because the RoamAnywhere Mobility Router provides fast and automatic handover between the enterprise WiFi networks and any carrier cellular network.

Enterprise desktop phone features such as single number reachability, unified caller ID, and corporate directory lookups are provided to mobile phones by natively integrating them into existing corporate PBXes.

More workers rely on mobile phones as their primary business phone, increasing the need to provide better in-building coverage and integrate options for heterogeneous enterprise environments. The RoamAnywhere Mobility Router’s RF-based location-aware technology ensures that in-building calls stay on the enterprise WLAN (using VoWLAN) to reduce cellular expenses and eliminate dropped or poor quality calls. Automatic handover of calls between WiFi and cellular is transparent to users.

Administrators can use the product to implement location-aware mobile policies. The router’s policy engine can apply and enforce policies dynamically based on users’ locations; the policies automatically adapt to where the user is so users no longer need to manually switch profiles on their mobile phones.

The company says provisioning users and dual-mode handsets (including Windows Mobile and Nokia/Symbian dual-mode phones) is simpler thanks to native integration with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP directories. Administrators can use a Web interface and no RF, WiFi, or cellular tuning is required. The company says the RoamAnywhere can be deployed to thousands of users by following separating control traffic from data/voice traffic, a hybrid architecture that reduces appliance load and overhead and provides fast response times and high application availability. Of the two available models, the 2000 Series RoamAnywhere Mobility Router (pricing begins at about $10,000) scales up to 100 simultaneous users for small and midsize enterprises or for enterprise branch or remote sites. The 4000 Series (priced from $28,000) scales up to 1000 simultaneous users and is designed for larger enterprises and global deployments.