The mesh market is garnering increased attention lately-and following a typical path in wireless evolution-complete with competition between startups and industry leaders, and competing proposals for a standard-all underscored by analyst predictions that the technology holds great promise.
Cisco Systems Inc. is among the newest companies to enter the fray, unveiling its outdoor wireless mesh solution and launching itself into the municipal Wi-Fi technology marketplace. Cisco said its new access point, called Aironet 1500, was built for large-scale deployments and can be deployed anywhere-rooftops, light posts or power poles.
“The market drivers that propelled widespread wireless adoption in the home and enterprise are now spurring a new demand to provide outdoor ubiquitous connectivity by wireless mesh technologies,” said Alan Cohen, senior director of Wireless Networking at Cisco.
Cisco will no doubt face tough competition from Tropos Networks Inc., BelAir Networks and Strix Systems Inc.-the startups that have dominated the Wi-Fi equipment market so far. But Cisco said it already has a dozen or so contracts to provide equipment for citywide projects, including Dayton, Ohio, and Lebanon, Ore. And, although Cisco wasn’t ready to compete for Philadelphia’s Wi-Fi business, the company said it is competing for San Francisco’s contract.
Philadelphia chose EarthLink Inc. to provide the city with a Wi-Fi network using Tropos’ equipment. The San Francisco citywide Wi-Fi project is still in the bidding process, with several companies, including Google Inc. and EarthLink, maneuvering for the contract.
Another large player, Motorola Inc., has been deploying its mesh equipment primarily in the government and public-safety markets and said its MotoMesh access point contains two standards-based 802.11 radios and two Mesh Enabled Architecture mobile broadband radios. The infrastructure provider said the set-up enables municipalities to deploy a single wireless access network that provides Wi-Fi to the public, yet provides first responders with separate, dedicated and secure access to communications. The company said its solution provides fixed and mobile broadband access to users in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band, as well as in the newly licensed 4.9 GHz public-safety band.
Motorola said it has been involved with developing the 802.11s IEEE mesh specification standards, for which there are already two camps-the Wi-Mesh Alliance led by Nortel Networks Ltd., and the SEEMesh led by Intel Corp., Texas Instruments Inc., Nokia Corp., NTT DoCoMo and Motorola. The process of drafting further proposals, voting and ratification of a mesh standard likely will take two to three more years, at which point mesh equipment already will have been deployed and installed. Interoperability amongst mesh equipment will have to wait for solutions that converge existing equipment.
The market for wireless mesh networking is set for stellar growth, but most of the growth will be in market segments not served by existing infrastructure, according to a new study from ABI Research.
“It’s an interesting market that has a lot of potential for alternative service providers such as Earthlink-ISPs who don’t have their own facilities at present,” said Sam Lucero, senior analyst of wireless connectivity at ABI. “It is an essential means for them to remain viable in the provision of services. Wireless mesh networking allows them a relatively cost-effective way to deploy their own facilities within targeted areas. But they’re not positioning this as directly competitive to triple-play services.”
In its study, ABI noted that although cable operators and telcos have not significantly embraced the mesh concept, several of them have invested in mesh networking companies, most of whom specialize in both full and partial mesh applications.
In a full mesh network, every node has a connection to every other node in the network. Full mesh is expensive to implement, but it’s also highly dependable since it can re-direct network traffic easily when failures occur.
Partial mesh is relatively inexpensive to deploy since only some of the network’s nodes are connected with all the other nodes. In a partial mesh network, most of the nodes are only connected to one or two other nodes, which is why partial mesh is usually used for peripheral networks that connect to a full mesh backbone network. Signals can still be re-routed in a partial mesh network, there just aren’t as many paths to choose from.
Mesh infrastructure in general is decentralized and is very reliable and resilient, since each node need only transmit as far as the next node, with nodes acting as repeaters, transmitting data from nearby nodes to peers that are too far away to reach in a single hop. The result is a network that can cover large and difficult terrain with a high degree of reliability for both fixed and mobile devices. Extra capacity isn’t a problem either, just add more nodes.
But remember, most Wi-Fi mesh networking is happening in unlicensed spectrum bands, where there are no guarantees. This is very different from networking in the licensed cellular spectrum bands controlled mostly by large carriers.
