With the consistently decreasing pricing and increasing availability of wireless Ethernet solutions, however, moving LANs to a wire-free environment is a growing trend, and tools like HP OpenView just don't provide an adequate solution for these setups. Symbol's WNMS is designed to integrate with the company's Spectrum24 high-speed wireless products, covering both its standard wireless Ethernet cards and its expansive line of handheld devices and wireless solutions. Symbol's hardware is 802.11-compliant, and the products offer access points as well as PC Card and PCI wireless adapters. My testing showed the Spectrum24 gear matched other popular wireless LAN product providers, including Cisco Systems and Lucent Technologies, in throughput, averaging between 5.5 Mbps and 7 Mbps when locked at an 11 Mbps data rate. Because it's configurable via telnet, serial and Web interfaces, the Symbol wireless environment was easy to put together.
Drivers are available for all major operating systems when installing the client products.
With the strong performance from Symbol's wireless hardware, I expected similar performance from its management solution. Standalone Version I concentrated on Symbol's standalone Windows NT product in my tests. The installation will warn you if these services aren't installed correctly and will in many cases not continue if all the requirements are not met. The version I looked at does not support Windows 2000, but Symbol says a future version should, possibly by the time this is printed. Once the software is installed, WNMS gives you the option of discovering all the wireless devices on your subnets.