The UK Department of Trade & Industry has finally given approval for Chasecom Ltd’s Cableless local area network Arlan to be used in the UK. The network, first shown by the UK arm of Canadian developer Telesystems SLW Inc at the June Network ’91 show, operates at 2.412GHz to 2.438GHz, the UK standard frequency. Currently the product supports NetWare 2.15 and NetWare 386. There is also support for Microsoft Lan Manager running the TCP/IP protocol. London-based Chasecom is trumpeting its product, which runs at 1Mbps as the first Cableless local area network to be cleared by the government for UK sale. This is true, but it was something of a photo finish since Crawley, Sussex-based Telecom Systems Ltd got approval for its Radiolink roughly five hours later: Chasecom got the morning appointment and the fame, their competitors did not enter the plush Department offices until after lunch. It must have been something of a disappointment to the Radiolink team, who were claiming at Networks ’91 in June that they would get there first. And neither is the only cableless local network on the market: in May BICC Data Networks launched InfraLan, which, since it uses infra-red light, rather than the radio spectrum, does not need approval. Chasecom’s Arlan costs UKP1,149 per interface unit.
