Can you hear me now (inside the building)? Good!

Verizon Business introduced this week the Verizon Business Managed Wireless LAN service, a service designed to enable corporate and government customers to use wireless technology to extend the reach of local area networks within office buildings, factories and other locations. In theory, the WLAN service provides organizations the opportunity to deploy a wireless LAN without additional investment in internal management and maintenance resources.

Verizon’s new service is designed to manage hardware developed by Aruba Networks, and is based upon the IEEE 802.11 industry standard for WLAN performance, operability and built-in security features. Verizon Business promises to obtain, install and test WLAN-related equipment, going on to manage performance and use, monitors the network to assist in prevention of unauthorized access, and provides reporting capabilities to highlight key performance metrics. The Verizon Business Managed Wireless LAN service will be available in mid-July in the U.S. as a stand-alone service or bundled with Verizon Business’ managed local- or wide-area networking services.

This chases the news of the earlier Verizon announcement this week regarding its wireless division choosing Lucent Technologies to deploy the company’s CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A technology into its nationwide network. Lucent’s Rev. A system, consisting of incremental hardware and software upgrades to Verizon Wireless’ existing Lucent-supplied base stations, seeks to enable Verizon Wireless to introduce a set of new services such as enhanced push-to-talk, messaging, and VoIP.

CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Revision A is an enhanced version of CDMA2000 1xEV-DO used to increase efficiency, data speeds and capacity of existing EV-DO networks. EV-DO Rev. A allows users to receive data (forward link) at speeds up to 3.1 Megabits per second (Mbps) and send data (reverse link) at speeds of up to 1.8 Mbps. These increased forward and reverse link data speeds reduce data latency and enable operators to deliver VoIP and other multimedia services.