ADTRAN’s (News - Alert) Bluesocket virtual Wireless LAN solution can now support a variety of service provider Wi-Fi businesses models, including cloud-based, managed services and resale, the company announced today. The company says these options enable service providers to create and deliver “new, profit-rich, cloud-based Wi-Fi service offerings.”

A couple of resellers are currently using this ADTRAN solution and several service providers are in the process of testing it, says Mads Lillelund, general manager of ADTRAN’s Bluesocket (News - Alert) Business Group.

With this release of the solution, the management software is enhanced for the whole cloud view, which is important because when you’re offering managed or hosted services to end users, you want to look at things differently, explains Lillelund. In this scenario, he adds, you may be looking at tens, hundreds or thousands of customers, so you need a clean look at the entire picture and the ability to drill down into various enterprises to make sure they’re locked and secured.

“ADTRAN’s vWLAN solution is optimal for service providers since it offers software-based, virtualized control and management that is centrally located at their network operations center,” says Lillelund. “Even better, service providers have the flexibility to sell the vWLAN solution as part of a resale, managed or cloud service. vWLAN as a cloud-based service opens up new opportunities for service providers in a highly competitive market.”

As discussed in previous TMCnet articles, ADTRAN’s purchase of Bluesocket last year moved the company into the vWLAN space. ADTRAN believes the move to 802.11n, the explosion in demand for wireless connectivity, and the adoption of cloud virtualization in enterprise networks created the ideal climate for it to enter the wireless LAN space and, in the process, “reset and redefine the whole wireless LAN industry,” as Gary Bolton (News - Alert), vice president of global marketing at ADTRAN, put it in an interview a year ago this month with TMCnet.

The Bluesocket solution leverages virtualization to put control of the wireless network into the data center – either as an appliance or as software running on a VMware server. Placing WLAN control in the data center allows for unprecedented scalability. That’s important in light of the explosion in wireless endpoints and the fact that wireless access has become a must-have not just a nice-to-have capability, meaning that more organizations are now deploying larger numbers of access points. Controlling WLAN networks from servers at the data center also significantly reduces power requirements, and it allows for a more secure overall architecture.

Lillelund has previously explained to TMCnet that while competing wireless LAN solutions tunnel about 80 percent of traffic from access points back to a controller, the ADTRAN solution authenticates traffic at the edge. (And access points talk to each other, so as users more around, the policy related to their connections move with them.) That makes for a more reliable solution, he explained, because the traffic as a result travels on shorter paths, meaning fewer points of potential failure. Because traffic on the ADTRAN/Bluesocket solution runs at the access point layer, he added, there is zero failover with zero packet loss.

As of last year, the ADTRAN vWLAN solution was in used by 3,000 customers worldwide. And in the piece last year, Lillelund noted that ADTRAN’s existing relationships with service providers would help open new customer opportunities for the Bluesocket solution, which is what we’re now seeing with today’s announcement.

To find out more about ADTRAN, visit the company at ITEXPO West 2012. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX. Visit ADTRAN in booth # 1313. For more information on ITEXPO (News - Alert) West 2012, click here.