Cisco Buys Airespace

Cisco Systems Wednesday said it plans to acquire privately-held WLAN vendor Airespace in a $450 million deal. Airespace is one of a number of start-ups to espouse a "thin" WLAN architecture, which centralizes network intelligence on a WLAN switch paired with stripped-down access points instead of building the intelligence into stand-alone access points. Cisco has been a vocal proponent of the latter architecture.