Hsinchu, Taiwan – Accton Technology Corporation and Atheros Communications, Inc. announced that, through their joint development efforts, Accton is now shipping 802.11a compliant wireless LAN products based on the Atheros AR5000 chipset. As an original design and original equipment (ODM/OEM) manufacturer, Accton will offer its wireless LAN solutions to those vendors worldwide who want to provide high-speed wireless LAN products to consumers and businesses.
“The Accton advantage is that our cost-effective solutions come designed and engineered for immediate sale, thus giving our customers an important time-to-market head start in the booming wireless LAN market,” said Jonathan Cheng, vice president of marketing, U.S. Operations, of Accton. “With Atheros 802.11a chipsets at the heart of our products, we can offer our customers a proven leading-edge technology along with our own value-added features to enhance security and ease-of-use. Many of our customers take our products and simply put their own labels on them or do form-factor changes and take them to market. Others have us customize the products in software or hardware to target specific vertical or horizontal markets.”
Accton plans to provide a complete suite of high-speed wireless LAN solutions using the Atheros AR5000 chipset, including 32-bit PC card (CardBus), miniPCI, and PCI client adapters; 11a and dual band (802.11a and 802.11b) access points; home and office gateways; and service provider gateways with DSL and cable modem interfaces built-in.
“Accton makes it very easy for wireless LAN vendors to get to market quickly with minimal startup costs,” said Mark Bercow, vice president of marketing of Atheros. “Their customizable designs include everything needed to market a highly credible product to users moving up to the higher speeds and enhanced reliability of Atheros’ 802.11a wireless LAN technology.”
First Products Available Now
The first two wireless products from Accton are an 802.11a wireless access point and an 802.11a wireless CardBus adapter. The access point supports up to 64 simultaneous wireless clients and provides enhanced security features, including 64-bit, 128-bit and 152-bit WEP encryption, and MAC address filtering. The CardBus adapter instantly connects the client computer to the wired network backbone at data transfer speeds of 54 Mbps, with automatic fallback to 48, 36, 24, 18, 12, 9, and 6 Mbps. Data rates up to 72 Mbps can be achieved using Atheros Turbo ModeO. Both wireless LAN solutions are available now.
About Atheros Communications, Inc.
Atheros Communications was founded in May 1998 by leading experts in radio and signal processing from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and private industry. The Company’s mission is to provide wireless networking technologies that drive transparent connections between all computing, communications, audio and video devices. Funded by August Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates and others, Atheros has raised a total of $98.3 million in three rounds of funding. The Company currently employs over 140 people and has filed more than 45 wireless technology patents. For more information, visit www.atheros.com or send email to [email protected].
