Gigabit Wireless of San Jose, Calif., is taking a new name and at the same time, taking its first steps in the wireless broadband market with a non-line-of-sight technology that should speed the deployment and boost the capacity of multichannel multipoint distribution service networks.
Gigabit now is known as Iospan Wireless, a change that came about because of the proliferation of the word “gigabit” throughout the wireless industry. Becoming Iospan was a way for the company to differentiate itself, said Ciricia Proulx, director of business development for Iospan.
The company was founded in late 1998 by researchers from Stanford University, and since that time, its growing staff of mostly electrical engineers have been developing a technology Iospan calls AirBurst.
The AirBurst products are based on Dr. Arogyaswami Paulraj’s research of Multiple Input Multiple Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing technology, which Iospan says greatly improves spectral efficiency through the use of multiple antenna types and smart-antenna technology. MIMO relies on the use of multiple Tx and Rx antenna types in both the send and receive sides of a broadband wireless access system.
“MIMO boosts a signal so high that it’s so far above the noise” it won’t cause interference, said Buck Gee, vice president of marketing for Iospan.
The signal can penetrate obstacles such as buildings or heavy foliage, and because of this, the customer’s antenna does not have to be precisely positioned in the line of sight of the AirBurst system antenna, the company said.
The AirBurst products include an access device, which is fundamentally an antenna mounted on the outside of a building; a base station, installed by an operator at a PCS site; and a system manager, which is located at the central networking location. The company said AirBurst requires as much as 400 percent less infrastructure than current wireless broadband systems.
“(Using AirBurst equipment) it takes 20 to 30 cell sites to cover the entire Bay Area. Our next nearest competitor requires four times that,” said Proulx.
MIMO-OFDM technology is expected to handle data capacities associated with fourth-generation applications-in excess of 4 Megabits per second-and support the same amount of data in both the upstream and downstream. And although MIMO-OFDM is primarily a fixed-wireless solution, mobile applications of the technology are around the corner. Iospan said third-generation mobile technologies wideband-CDMA and cdma2000 both have proposed MIMO enhancements.
The company also said it is part of a movement now under way to initiate MIMO-OFDM as the standard for non-line-of-sight wireless broadband infrastructure and networks.
“People in the marketplace have openly agreed that we need to go to a MIMO standard,” said Gee.
The company currently is working with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.16 working group on a common standard.
Iospan will begin field trials of AirBurst in the second half of next year when the wireless broadband market is expected to ramp up.
