NetMotion Wireless today announced the release of Mobility 11, the latest version of the company’s mobile VPN solution that offers up to double the data throughput of its previous version and significantly enhances server scalability, according to a company official.

Mobility 11 was designed in large part to help potential customers such as public-safety agencies utilize bandwidth-intensive applications like high-definition video more freely, according to Steve Fallin, senior product manager at NetMotion Wireless.

“This is a really powerful release,” Fallin said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “With the performance improvements that we’ve put into [Mobility] version 11, we’re up to twice as fast—it depends on the test scenario, of course. We’re giving a lot of flexibility to a lot of these departments to experiment with more than just a handful of people doing high-definition video.

“Between that, the video-specific performance enhancements and our ability to maintain high-quality video and voice data streams in conditions of high packet loss, we think we’ve got something really special here from a performance standpoint.”

To maximize these performance gains, customers will need to upgrade their servers to a Mobility 11 server, Fallin said.

“The performance work is almost all on the server. We encourage everybody to keep their servers and clients in sync,” he said. “That doesn’t mean the old clients won’t work. We test for backward compatibility. So, if you have a supported client, it can connect to the version 11 server.”

Other key features included in the Mobility 11 release are the ability to evenly distribute traffic load across multiple servers and increased capacity, which can be realized by customers in different ways, Fallin said.

“The other thing we’ve done is increase the number of users we can support on a single server,” Fallin said. “So, when you’re designing a network, you have a choice of adding more servers to gain performance or reducing the number of individual platforms that you need to manage, so you can cut down on your overhead.

“That range of decisions is getting the just-right-sized deployment for whoever it is you’re supporting, whether you are LA-RICS or a regional consortium of suburban police departments that decided to pool their money and build their own data center to serve all of their needs—something we see quite a bit of. You’ve got a range of deployment options that you can scale out to whatever deployment style that you’ve got.”

Mobility 11 also supports use in five languages other than English: French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese, making the NetMotion Wireless product significantly more attractive to entities in 130 countries that have a combined population of 2.6 billion people, fallin said.

“Our Japanese customers have had great interest in the technology,” he said. “One of the limiting factors for them is that they really needed something that their people in the field can use and understand. So, the idea of being able to put a Japanese client in the hands of the same sorts of people that use our product today—military, public safety, ambulance and mobile field workers, as a generic class—is going to be key to our growth as a company in the coming years.”