Most vendors want their customers to use their APs and NICs exclusively.
They offer some degree of reduced capability if there is a need to mix and
match different brands of APs and NICs.
In most cases the issues are
largely cosmetic but they may result in increased calls to the help desk. Until
the next generation of products is released, the system manager has a difficult
decision to make, to either use a single-vendor system, with all the NICs and
APs coming from that vendor, or to do without the more advanced management
tools that single-vendor solutions provide.
As shown in Figure
, in a closed
network such as a corporate network, there are advantages to a single-vendor
solution. Holding one vendor responsible for equipment performance eliminates
the possibility of one vendor blaming the other vendor for equipment failures.
In a more open environment, such as a college or university network or an
airport terminal, a single-vendor solution may not be feasible. Suggestions can
be offered about what equipment should be purchased, but the network
administrator will probably need to support whatever the users bought.
Also remember that the Cisco bridges, like many other vendor bridges, are
proprietary implementations of the 802.11 standard and therefore vendor
interoperability cannot be attained.