Ekahau Inc., a leading provider of Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), today announced that its Ekahau RTLS location tracking solution and Ekahau Site Survey (ESS) Wi-Fi network planning and optimization tools will work seamlessly with the upcoming 802.11n standard.

Enterprises are already embracing 802.11n because it offers a number of performance gains, including radio coverage and speed. ABI Research forecasts that 47 percent of all 2008 Wi-Fi chipset shipments will be 802.11n draft 2.0. Ekahau’s announcement strengthens the company’s leadership position in the Wi-Fi RTLS and site survey markets, and confirms that its technology continues to support the evolution of Wi-Fi and the standards themselves.

“802.11n is the next big wave in the enterprise networking market, so it is very important that our solutions will continue working over this new standard,” said Pauli Misikangas, Ekahau’s CTO. “With 802.11n, the quality of signal measurements actually increases, which positively impacts accuracy of the Ekahau RTLS solution. Unlike some other less sophisticated systems, our patented probabilistic algorithms can take the full advantage of the 802.11n’s MIMO technology with multiple antennas.”

While providing a performance boost over the legacy systems, 802.11n is far from being a plug-and-play technology. It requires careful consideration in planning and deployment, in order to achieve the full benefits for data, voice or location use.

ESS software will help organizations with new 802.11n installations both in off-site planning and post-deployment verification and troubleshooting. ESS’s graphical visualization of the network’s coverage enables enterprises to “see the network” and maximize its performance. The upcoming new features ESS will provide to 802.11n users include:

• Signal prediction for off-site network planning;
• Site surveys to verify network coverage and operation;
• Easy-to-use single-view network health analysis;
• One-click troubleshooting assistance with live network status;
• Visualization of network characteristics, such as coverage, interference and data rate;
• Visualizing the impact of the most common access point parameters, such as channel bonding, number of streams, and legacy support mode;
• Generating reports for the IT-management and deployment engineers; and
• Using site survey data to enable an easy Ekahau RTLS deployment.

ESS is the only site survey tool on the market that enables RTLS deployment after the standard Wi-Fi site survey, by creating an RTLS positioning model from the survey data. Any Wi-Fi network analyzed with ESS is ready for tracking assets and people with Wi-Fi tags and RTLS software.

Ekahau RTLS 4.X, with its support of 802.11n, is available now. ESS 4.5., which will include the 802.11n support, will ship during the third quarter of 2008. Existing customers with an active support and maintenance contract will receive the ESS 802.11n upgrades free of charge.

About Ekahau Inc.
Ekahau Inc. is the industry leader in providing Wi-Fi-based RTLS solutions. Ekahau's customers, including several Fortune 500 companies worldwide, are realizing the benefits of Wi-Fi based location services and innovative Wi-Fi network planning and optimization tools. Ekahau’s solutions are being used in more than 150 hospitals around the world, as well as by manufacturers, mining/oil/gas companies, government agencies and the military. Ekahau partners include wireless software developers, leading system integrators and international OEM partners, who develop and market wireless enterprise applications. Ekahau is a U.S. based corporation, with offices in Saratoga, Calif.; Reston, Va.; Helsinki, Finland; and Hong Kong, China. For more information about Ekahau, please visit at www.ekahau.com.