Wireless software gains support for Win CE

April 25, 2001 —

A new version of wireless connectivity software from NetMotion Wireless will run on Windows CE-based devices and include the Rijndael encryption algorithm being proposed for the federal government's Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

The additional Microsoft support for NetMotion Mobility 2.1, due in May, arrives as some market research data show Win CE and PocketPC finally making headway at corporate sites where users are looking for handhelds that can run full-blown applications.

The federal AES is expected to be formally completed this summer (more information is available at NIST ). The 128-bit encryption software is considered much stronger than the current Data Encryption Standard and Triple-DES, and corrects inherent weaknesses of those techniques.

First introduced in December 2000, NetMotion Mobility is able to manage IP addresses so that a session stays intact as mobile users move between wireless LAN subnets or between wireless LANs and long-distance wireless carriers, says Shelly Julien, vice president of marketing. Today, when users move between such nets, the IP address of the device changes, and in most cases, the user's connection breaks, and the application session ends. NetMotion is designed to keep the session alive. If a long-distance cellular network connection should drop, the NetMotion server software acts as proxy for the client, keeping the application session intact until the user can redial.

Besides offering several encryption techniques, NetMotion creates the equivalent of a VPN over a WAN link to the corporate firewall. The software has a battery of management applications for tracking details about client devices and their users' activities on the net, and an SNMP interface to work with net management tools such as Computer Associates' Unicenter and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView.

The software has two parts. The client code, ranging from about 300K to 800K bytes, is installed manually with a diskette, on Win 95 and 98, PocketPC and Win CE 3.0. It will run on Win 2000 computers later this year. The NetMotion Mobility Server installs on any NT server and, later this year, on Win 2000 servers.

Version 2.1 will be available in May for $200 per user connection in groups of 25, with volume discounts available. The server software is included.

Network World