Fixed Wireless Equipment

Mesh Wireless Platform

Wave Wireless recently introduced its "all-in-one" 2.4 GHz broadband wireless solution that offers point-to-multipoint and mesh options to connect networks over distances of up to 25 miles and reduce shadowing problems.

by Wayne Kawamoto [June 18, 2002]

Wave Wireless Networking, a provider of broadband wireless solutions, announced that it is now shipping its SPEEDLAN 9000 products. According to Wave Wireless, SPEEDLAN 9000 is the company's first product line that provides flexible building-to-building, multipoint, and mesh configuration options in a single broadband wireless platform.

The company says that organizations that want to install and use wireless base stations, either as part of a campus network or a metropolitan area network, are often challenged with shadows in their network. These holes in the coverage area, caused when obstructions such as groves of trees, hills, or large buildings block the wireless signal, make it difficult to provide coverage throughout a wireless metropolitan area network.

The mesh routing technology in SPEEDLAN 9000 is designed to help customers who already use MMDS, LMDS, or unlicensed base stations to solve the problem of shadows. With SPEEDLAN 9000, the company claims that broadband service providers can increase their wireless coverage area, extend their wireless infrastructure to more customers than before, and generate revenue from customers that are unreachable today.

According to the company, when using mesh technology, localized deployments in a campus, business park, apartment complex, or residential neighborhood are easier than ever. And unlike base station or access point products, no line-of-sight analysis is needed to determine if a building can "see" back to a base station. If a building can "see" any other building already on the mesh network, it is ready to be connected. Each new building added to a mesh network should expand the customer's ability to connect even more buildings, scaling up to 100 buildings per channel.

Using a star topology, the company says that users can connect buildings up to 25 miles apart at Ethernet LAN speeds. And with less than a day's work, users may be able to eliminate leased line charges, increase connectivity speed and productivity, and take control over their building-to-building communications. With a SPEEDLAN 9000 base station, users may be able to connect up to 100 remote buildings to a central location. Schools, hospitals, and banks can benefit by increasing connection speeds between buildings and reducing or even eliminating leased line fees.

SPEEDLAN 9000 relies on AES encryption to guarantee data security and network integrity, and provides web based management for ease of use. Additional user benefits may be realized with the Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) server, DHCP client, and Network Address Translation (NAT) functions built into each unit. Also, by allowing users to choose between a self-healing mesh, point-to-multipoint with a polling base station, or a simple building-to-building deployment, the SPEEDLAN 9000 may provide a platform that can grow with a customer's business and be easily re-deployed as their needs may change.

"Our new, versatile, SPEEDLAN 9000 series is designed to provide a reliable, flexible, and cost-effective communication solution to a host of customers," stated Patrick Pacifico, vice president of marketing and product management for Wave Wireless. "The 9000 takes broadband wireless products to a new level with features that are important to tech savvy buyers looking for the highest level of performance and flexibility."

"The addition of the SPEEDLAN 9000 series greatly enhances our product line-up, and offers customers a flexible and highly scalable solution to meet the challenge of building-to-building and last-mile broadband access," added Pacifico.

Availability and pricing
SPEEDLAN 9000 products are available in a variety of models. SPEEDLAN 9101 and 9104 are mesh-only products used to deploy a mesh network. SPEEDLAN 9102 and 9103 may be configured as a building-to-building backbone, a point-to-multipoint star topology, or as a self-healing mesh topology.

Products range in price from $899 to $1,799.

A complete product specification sheet may be found at the company website.

Orders from channel distributors are currently being filled and pre-production orders have been shipped.

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