As wireless LANs gain wider adoption and begin to be used in large deployments, rather than just in a conference room or small branch office, IT managers are discovering that the tools to manage them are nowhere near the same level of maturity as management tools are for the wired LAN. Many access points, gateways, routers, and clients require manual configuration, come with unique management tools that work with only one or two types of devices, provide limited capabilities, or otherwise require separate management.

The University of Wyoming encountered this dilemma as it deployed 80 access points throughout the campus to ensure that students and faculty had wireless access to both university systems and the public Internet. Justin Borthwick, the campus's systems programmer for the wireless network, was configuring access accounts for every new student each semester, an overwhelming job that he could not continue to manage as the popularity of wireless access increased among the 12,000 students and 2,500 faculty members. "When wireless first came out, it was a pain in the butt to manage because you had to manage each device manually," he recalls.

Administration staff was overwhelmed trying to match wireless access requests with student records, so many staff members simply stopped checking, permitting access by nonstudents who wanted free Internet access. And the manual approach wouldn't permit the issuance of temporary access to conference facility visitors, something Borthwick wanted to offer because the university is a popular conference site. Although not too concerned about unauthorized access to university systems — Borthwick is implementing virtual private networks (VPNs) for such access, and he has set up the wireless LAN as a separate, public segment — he was concerned about bandwidth and user management.

Borthwick also could not monitor usage and traffic levels at each access point to identify choke points and underused resources in the three-year-old network. Although Cisco Systems provided a monitoring tool with the wireless network infrastructure on which the university had standardized, it did not provide sufficient management capabilities. "The software lets you see only how many people are logged in, but it doesn't show how many people at any given time are at any access point." So the university began using wireless LAN management software from Roving Planet that let it track usage at each access point from a central location. "We discovered that three library access points were not used at all, so we moved them elsewhere." With the software, the student account registration was also greatly simplified: "I created two interfaces, and I was done." The effort did require changing the access points' firmware to work with the Roving Planet software, as well as changing some of the wireless VPN architecture to work under Roving Planet's assumptions, but it took Borthwick just two months to reconfigure the system so it could be managed easily.

The cost was not expensive: about $20,000, which Borthwick figures accounts for 5% to 10% of the wireless LAN's total costs.

Borthwick also needed the wireless LAN management tool to monitor which users were where and what systems they were accessing, both to help identify unauthorized users and to identify bandwidth hogs and other troublesome usage sources. The software also lets him update each access point's settings, such as registering MAC addresses, from a central location. "With [Cisco's] LEAP, I had to register every MAC address manually, which required way too much labor." Today, with third-party tools, "we're seeing more and more options, such as Wavelink to manage access points," he notes. Borthwick is also moving away from MAC address authentication, which is "troublesome to manage," in favor of more modern wireless security mechanisms.

Warren Wilson, an analyst at Summit Strategies, says that the University of Wyoming's experience is not unique. "It's a daunting task" to put together wireless management systems, he says. Among the areas that need management are security (signal range and scope, user authentication and intrusion detection, and access validation), hardware updating (such as updating policies, radio channels, and hardware IDs), and performance monitoring and optimization (such as identifying site gaps, rerouting traffic to reduce congestion, and compensating for transient interference).

Wilson says the reason for the relative dearth of wireless LAN management tools is due to the fact that the wireless market is relatively small. That also explains why it tends to be smaller vendors such as Wavelink, Cognio, and Roving Planet that offer such solutions, as well as specialty integrators such as WhereNet. While some run as plug-ins for Computer Associates' Unicenter or Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, most are separate utilities, he says. Wilson notes that larger consulting firms, such as IBM Global Services and Hewlett-Packard Services, also can put together wireless LAN management packages.