The Cisco Aironet 1500 Series Access Point is priced at US$3,995 and has already been deployed in Dayton, Ohio and Lebanon, Oregon, said Alan Cohen, senior director of wireless networking at Cisco.

The movement toward installation of public Wi-Fi systems for cities and towns has already reached hundreds of locations, and Gartner Inc. recently estimated that there are now more than 60,000 Wi-Fi hot spots worldwide.

Cisco's entry into the field comes years after some smaller players, and even bigger vendors such as Nortel Networks Ltd., entered the market, said Zeus Kerravala, an analysts at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston.

But Cohen said Cisco customers will benefit from tying the new access point into a network that can be controlled by the new Cisco Wireless LAN Controller Module for the Integrated Services Router family, which sells for $2,300. Similar software will be deployed on a Cisco Wireless Service Module (WiSM) for the Catalyst 6500 Series switch, selling at $45,000, he said. The WiSM product can support up to 1,500 access points.

Kerravala said the Cisco access point and the LAN controller modules "are a no-brainer" for customers that need simplicity in setting up mesh networks with controls. Any customer that wants independent access points, however, can rely on running Cisco's Internetworking Operating System software instead, he said.