Aruba makes push into industrial WiFi market

Aruba Networks is making a big push into the industrial WiFi market, announcing a new family of hardened and explosion-resistant access points as well as two partnership agreements with ruggedized device makers Panasonic Toughbook and Psion Tecklogix. It also announced a customer win with petrochemical company Amerada Hess.

Aruba decided to design access points from the ground up because current access points trying to serve the industrial market don't cut it in terms of being explosion resistant. The industrial market has been a difficult one for WiFi companies to crack given the interference problems the heavy metal interior of industrial facilities pose. Michael Tennefoss, head of strategic marketing with Aruba, said the company uses higher power radios--200 milliwatt instead of 100 milliwatt--to get better throughput in these areas and processes the signals through adaptive radio management to recover any lost signals. The access points can also be powered using solar power, a car battery, street light or power over Ethernet.

To read more about Aruba's push into the industrial WiFi market:
- take a look at this release