Cisco gets hip to mesh, WLAN management - Company's centralized WLAN management product comes nearly one year after competitive offerings.

Cisco Systems did a bit of catching up last week when it finally announced products to support centrally managed, large Wi-Fi and mesh networks for outdoor WLAN deployments.

The giant networking company's Unified Wireless Network uses a centralized architecture for deploying WLANs across the enterprise. The devices come almost a year to the day after Symbol introduced the first device to the market, the WS 2000 Wireless Switch. As opposed to Symbol's and those from competitors that followed, Cisco's Wi-Fi solution previously required a network administrator to manage one AP (access point) at a time.

Taking the management focus one step further, Cisco also …