The Marlborough, Massachusetts-based networking vendor’s new Unified Switch is aimed at companies with up to 250 users, and with its sub-$3,000 list price is designed to compete aggressively with Cisco’s Catalyst 3750 series, at around $20,000.

That’s really a wired Cisco switch and an Airespace WLAN switch in the same box, with two separate management interfaces and two IP addresses, said Bob Honour, European sales director. Another device the Unified Switch will compete with is the D-Link xStack DWS-3227, at around $5,000.

In addition to the lower box price, the other two vendors also license their AP software, whereas the two new APs accompanying the Unified Switch have a one-off price of $249 for the single-radio and $399 for the dual-radio model, in both cases the radios being a/b/g.

Another interesting feature of the two APs is that they can be configured, via a Web GUI, to operate as standalone fat APs for deployments of up to 10 people, or as a thin AP managed by the Unified Switch.

This means a company can buy them and configure for fat operation, then go thin as it grows and invests in a Unified Switch, said Honour. The switch itself is a 24-port, 10/100/1000, Layer-2 device, with four of its ports able to be fitted with SFP modules for fiber connectivity.

This is not 3Com’s first foray into WLAN switching, of course. Traditionally a vendor of fat APs, it has been OEMing Trapeze Networks’ WLAN switch for sale into the enterprise market for a couple of years now, with customers able to transform their fat 3Com APs into thin ones managed by the Trapeze switch by changing the firmware on them.

The Trapeze relationship will continue, said Honour, with the Unified Switch and new APs targeting smaller companies. This thinking is also evident in the inclusion, on the box, of a management station that can be accessed from a PC plugged into one of the ports.

On the security front, Honour said one of the features of the new offering is rogue AP detection by the legitimate ones on the network via the SSID it broadcasts when it comes on.

They detect it and alert the management station, he explained. The system can then broadcast to knock any endpoint associated to the rogue off the network, encouraging it to re-associate to a legitimate AP.

The pricing and functionality of the Unified Switch and accompanying APs, together with 3Com’s continued breadth of partner channel, represent a significant challenge to Cisco in its assault on the SMB space.