The Long Distance Computer

The KVM switch ranks right up there with some of the best technology a lot of people have never heard of. Such products let you hook multiple computers and switch between them using a single keyboard, monitor (video), and mouse (thus the KVM). One of the leaders in that area, Avocent , is bring Wi-Fi into the KVM world, but not yet as a switch. Their wireless KVM is an "extender."

The company has had wired extenders in its LongView line for a while now -- such products let you have a PC in one place while your workstation with monitor, keyboard and mouse to view and control that PC are somewhere else. The Avocent LongView KVM Extender is the company's first try at making such products wireless.

"[Going wireless is] a follow on from our tradition to reducing cables in a data center," says Matt Nelson, director of sales and marketing for wireless technology at Avocent. "We've gone from multiple cables to one thick cable to Cat5 Ethernet to none." He says customers continue to want fewer and fewer lines to run.

The wireless extender is definitely geared toward Avocent's traditional IT audience -- with a price of $995 to get the two unit package, you won't be running your basement PC from the attic with this. The traditional use of extenders is to give folks access to PCs in inaccessible areas (such as server rooms), or for use in camped or rented offices where cutting through walls for cables is not an option.

A tweaked version of the 5GHz 802.11a was chosen as the transport method so it wouldn't conflict with the more popular 2.4GHz 802.11b/g used by many companies for production networks. The units use AES for security.

Nelson says the proprietary aspect of their 802.11a -- it doesn't use the TCP/IP protocol at all, for instance -- helps deliver a throughput of as much as 42Mbps. Such speeds are what help deliver the video performance it claims to have: 1024x768 in 24-bit color running full-speed video at 30 frames per second. All on the air waves.

Nelson claims the distance numbers they quote to safely deliver that video performance are actually conservative.

"There's always showmanship with distance. I picked a number that's conservative: 100 feet at full speed through walls. In IT data centers, they're pretty conservative, and we want their first experience to be positive.

LongView Wireless is Avocent's first wireless product, but Nelson also says without being specific that it's "logical based on our background ... to assume we'll expand this into other product lines." So perhaps we're not far from getting a wireless KVM switch that will let us control multiple PCs around the house from a central location.