Arcturus and Ralink Partner to Provide Secure Wireless Product Solutions For Homes and Businesses
Tuesday, February 24th, 2004
SUPPORT FOR INDUSTRY LEADING RALINK 802.11A/B/G CHIPSETS NOW AVAILABLE IN AIRMARSHAL® SECURE WIRELESS VPN FIRMWARE SUITE
Cupertino and Silicon Valley Calif., February 24 2004 — Ralink Technology, innovators of high-performance, cost effective wireless LAN chipset solution, and Arcturus Networks today announced the inclusion of Ralink device support within the AIRmarshal® wireless VPN firmware suite.
By combining industry leading WLAN technology with the Arcturus AIRmarshal wireless VPN firmware suite, Arcturus and Ralink can offer OEM and ODM product developers cost effective, highly secure wireless solutions that can scale from networked home devices to metro hotspot networks to college campuses. In-stat MDR predicts the rollout of wireless devices and access points to increase from 22.7 to over 40 million units shipped by 2007.
Ralink Technology chipsets are optimized for both performance and cost. The Ralink two-chip WiFi 802.11g solution, RT2500, boasts a 2.4 GHz radio transceiver and an integrated baseband/MAC chip that slashes Bill-of-Materials (BOM) costs for equipment vendors allowing them to gain a stronger foothold in the highly competitive WLAN market. The RT2500 chipset offers the best performance among similar chips in the market, e.g., the system input sensitivity for peak transmissions of 54 Mbps is about -72 dBm while transmission rates are also impressive, with throughput as high as 23 Mb/s in short distances and capable of 15Mb/s at 400 meters in the right open spaces.
Equally significant is the highly efficient operation of the new chipset in idle mode, which accounts for the majority of the operating time of wireless LAN products. In idle mode, the power consumption of the new Ralink 802.11b/g chipset is 50 to 75 percent less than other leading designs, thanks to advanced power management built into the chipset. As for normal operating modes, the chipset trims 50 percent power consumption from competing systems in receive mode, and another 30 percent in transmit mode prolonging battery life of mobile devices.
“By combining our WLAN chipsets with the Arcturus AIRmarshal firmware suite we believe we have achieved a level of low cost, high performance, and strong security that will allow our OEM and ODM customers to be very successful in the growing WiFi market.” said Sheng Lee, Ralink’s CTO, “Our partnership with Arcturus will also bring the end user the future in wireless performance and security.”
AIRmarshal firmware suite is built on top of core networking functions including; routing, IP address assignment, firewall, filtering and bridging. The firmware suite enables full access point support allowing numerous wireless network clients to connect to the host network in a secure, controlled or metered way. AIRmarshal accomplishes this by using industry leading VPN techniques to establish a wireless encrypted tunnel between access point and client or between client and host servers. AIRmarshal can also be deployed with an on-board RADIUS server to enable the management of multiple wireless access points and / or clients.
AIRmarshal Wireless security is provided via key exchanges, certificates, VPN tunnelling and encryption, including support for popular security architectures already built into the Windows? operating system and industry standard IPsec. AIRmarshal RADIUS is equipped with authentication, access and accounting capabilities making it suitable for integrating into a metering and billing framework. The AIRmarshal architecture is scalable from low-end RG WAPs to wireless hotspot access devices and helps to reduce an OEMs time-to-market. By combining forces, Arcturus and Ralink can now offer OEMs a compelling time-to-market solution, which also gives them a competitive price advantage.
“We believe Ralink has truly addressed the needs of WLAN device OEMs and ODMs, providing them a robust multi-mode wireless solution, at a price that enables them to remain highly competitive in the market.” said Rich Larsen, Arcturus COO, “By working directly with Ralink, we are able to extend multi-mode secure wireless access to our OEM customer enabling the next generation of residential gateways, access point and hot spot devices.”
Pricing and Availability
Contact Ralink or Arcturus for more information and specific pricing.
About Ralink Solutions
Ralink 802.11g chip set solution, RT2500, consists of the RT2525, a 2.4-GHz 802.11g radio-on-a-chip, and the RT2560, a multi-protocol MAC/baseband processor. Using its patented OFDM receiver, the RT2560 enhances multi-path performance and sensitivity. In addition, it supports an array of security features such as 64/128-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX), Wi-Fi($trade;) Protected Access (WPA), Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-CCMP). The RT2560 also supports 802.11e (QoS) and supports PCI / miniPCI / Cardbus and UART buses interfaces.
About Arcturus RG
Arcturus partners directly with semiconductor vendors to provide RG software and hardware solutions with various combinations of broadband access, wireless access, device management, security, VPN, media and voice. Arcturus designs its RG solutions to incorporate an extensible management infrastructure called MIBflex^(TM). MIBflex enables real-time remote management, provisioning, monitoring and upgrading of in-field devices through various front-end plug-ins such as SNMP. The nature of this architecture ensures scalability and flexibility not achievable through other solutions and enables the addition and provisioning of services dynamically, as required or on-demand. Other RG firmware suites plug directly in MIBflex including sentryVPN, AIRmarshal and SIPstream retaining an un-paralleled level of access and extensibility for an OEM or MSO.
About Arcturus Networks Inc.
Arcturus Networks Inc. provides Residential Gateway solutions that enable manufacturers to bring converged home networking products to market fast. Arcturus firmware is modular and portable and based around a rich management architecture called MIBflex. Into MIBflex Arcturus can apply other firmware suites including sentryVPN security, SIPstream voice and AIRmarshal wireless. Arcturus has numerous semiconductor and OEM customers and partners and leverages these relationships to help reduce time-to-market and risk. Arcturus is the innovator of the industry leading SIPjack, the worlds smallest SIP based VoIP Telephony adapter.
About Ralink Technology Corporation
Ralink Technology Corp. is a fabless wireless semiconductor company that develops complete-solution chipsets for 802.11a/b/g WLAN standards. Ralink’s innovative radio frequency (RF), baseband and medium access control (MAC) technologies offer optimum system solutions for the WLAN standards. Ralink is privately held with its design center in Cupertino, California, and headquarters / support center in Hsinchu, Taiwan. For more information, For more information, visit www.ralinktech.com.tw or send email tinfo@ralinktech.com