MeshNetworks offers .11b access point, router
NEW YORK-With Federal Communications Commission technical approval now in hand, MeshNetworks, Maitland, Fla., has made commercially available a new 802.11b access point and a router the company believes will bring to wireless communications the inherent strengths of the wireline Internet.
The company is in the process of fulfilling a dozen orders, some of them from traditional wireless network operators, said Rick Rotondo, vice president of technical marketing.
“In a mesh network, for each dollar a subscriber pays you, they’re also subsidizing the network because their device helps deploy it. Mesh networks are about clients cooperating instead of competing,” he said.
“You can add the technology to any radio and triple the range of the access point. The point is not to shout six miles from a cell site but to seed the network so it builds a mesh that provides coverage everywhere in a tower-less network.”
The MeshLAN AP 400 integrates patented multi-hopping and network management software into an 802.11b access point to enhance range, capacity and scalability for wireless local area networks.
Multi-hop routing allows end-user clients to skip to alternate access points if the one they are on fails or becomes badly congested. It also allows devices to form ad hoc peer-to-peer networks that, in turn, reduce demands on individual access points.
“A mesh network, if successful, will have clients, silicon and software sophisticated enough so there is sufficient processing and bandwidth capacity. And with omni-directional antennas, less power is needed to transmit and less power is used at each device, so the total energy used goes way down,” Rotondo said.
“To do this, you have to build in strong routing and distribution capabilities, and this is the core of our intellectual property.”
The FCC also approved the MeshLAN WR 400 wireless router, which can connect wireless users to distant access points without the need for line-of-site communications.
“Mesh networks are a monster technology because they scale and don’t have the tragedy of the commons. Instead of the more cows graze, the less the grass grows, the more cows graze, the more the grass grows,” said David Isenberg, a former Bell Labs researcher who is now an independent telecommunications analyst based in Cos Cobb, Conn.
“But multi-hop networks have one problem because each time you hop, you add delay, so they may not work so well for real-time voice.”
