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Telecommunications Wavion debuts first WiFi mesh technology with MIMO
Telecommunications Wavion debuts first WiFi mesh technology with MIMO | Wavion debuts first WiFi mesh technology with MIMO |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Wednesday, 24 May 2006 | |
  
Wireless mesh standard nears Cisco launches WiFi mesh product Israeli company Wavion, has entered the metro WiFi mesh market with a range of access points claimed to be the first to use MIMO (multiple input multiple output technology) in a mesh network application. The company, founded in 2000, is backed with $US22 million in venture funding from blue-chip investors Sequoia Capital and Elron Electronics Industries. It claims that its technology will "transform the metro WiFi mesh market" by supporting higher speeds, and better coverage with minimal dead spots. "One spatially adaptive access point from Wavion does the work of three to four conventional APs, reducing service providers' capital and operating expenditures by 50 percent," the company claims. WiFi mesh networks have been deployed by municipal councils in hundreds of US cities, and elsewhere but, according to Wavion, all suffer from significant limitations: they require dense deployments of conventional access points because their range, coverage and capacity are limited and suffer from dramatic decreases in capacity as the number of hops between access points to reach one with an external connection increase. According to Wavion "Because the APs in mesh networks use commoditised silicon originally designed for indoor deployments, the potential for improvement is limited. Demanding outdoor environments require custom-designed ASICs to meet the specific demands of metro-scale Wi-Fi." Even if the Wavion technology lives up to its claims, the company is up against some significant competitors: Cisco, Nortel and Motorola as well as smaller companies specialising in mesh WiFi products such as Tropos Networks, Stryix Systems and Firetide. Also the IEEE is close to finalising a standard for WiFi mesh technology and Wavion has given no indication that it will follow this standard. Tropos, which does only mesh networks, claimed to have more than 300 customers and 60 resellers in 30 countries around the world at the end of 2005. According to its website "No one else has successfully deployed metro-scale Wi-Fi networks in as many outdoor, mission-critical applications as Tropos Networks. And, regardless of client technology, no one else has successfully deployed mesh to deliver up to 54 Mbps data rates with 99 percent coverage in such large numbers before. Last November Strix Systems was selected by a Macedonian ISP to create a country-wide wireless mesh network capable of delivering broadband data, video and VoIP to the entire population. An IEEE standards group is working on a new variant of 802.11 wireless local area network standard covering mesh wireless networks, 802.11s, and earlier this year passed a key milestone with the adoption of a single proposal as the basis for the new standard. The new standard will define a protocol for auto-configuring paths between access points in a wireless distribution system. |
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