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August 7, 2006

Wavion Talks Turkey: Numbers and a Device on Beamforming Metro-Scale Wi-Fi

By Glenn Fleishman

The Israel-based firm offers some details and a product shipping date: While Wavion’s focus on its beamforming metro-scale Wi-Fi technology isn’t to sell hardware, but rather to license their approach and software into other makers’ gear, the company will offer devices that will be fully production oriented. The WS410 access point sports six antenna and uses beamforming—a single radio method of handling signal reflection and directionality—to provide what they term a vastly increased coverage area.

Wavion’s approach seeks to remove an intermediate level of wireless devices between the highest-end backhaul and the end-user. In most metro-scale systems, there’s a front-end 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi access point which is aggregated—either through an integral radio or, with Tropos, a backhaul unit for a cluster of mesh nodes—to a higher-level of the network which then picks up a fiber optic or licensed wireless backhaul to a point of presence. Wavion says that their units can serve end users and tie into the highest level of aggregated backhaul.

In trials near their office in San Jose and in conjunction with Conxx, a firm that operates an older-technology wireless network—10 years old—called AllCoNet2 in Maryland’s Allegany County, Wavion says that they were able to show a dramatically reduced number of APs per square mile for comparable service. In their tests compared with gear from other metro-scale vendors, Wavion said that they could achieve better coverage with eight units a square mile than the best results from other gear using 25 APs.

Connx’s CTO Jeff Blank said they have had requests from the county’s municipalities at Wi-Fi overlays for their existing 500-square-mile system. They evaluated 12 Wi-Fi metro-scale vendors starting 18 months ago in rigorous standard test conditions. Blank said that Wavion’s test units showed at least two times the area, and often three to four times the area, of the best of the 12 other vendors’ equipment. He declined to identify the best of breed in their testing.

Pricing will vary based on a number of parameters that Wavion identified only vaguely, but in a deployment example, the firm priced their gear at over $3,000 and a competitor’s at $2,000. Wavion said the WS410 will ship August 30, and be resold through other channels, including OEMs and partners.

In an interview last week, Wavion said that they had removed the controversial SDMA (space-division multiple access) from the software in this first product release, the WS410 access point, but will offer it through later upgrades. I say that SDMA is controversial because some in the industry maintain it’s not possible. SDMA relies on using beamforming to target unmodified Wi-Fi adapters with enough energy that those adapters and no others can “hear” the signal. The adapters cannot use CDMA on their uplink, of course. Wavion plans four SDMA channels per access point, and say this would aggregate 216 Mbps in the best reception areas for downlink access. Some experts hope that future revisions to the MAC (media access control) layer of 802.11 adapters would provide an option like SDMA for better use of shared frequencies.

When I previously compared Wavion’s SDMA with Vivato’s technology, their PR folks were upset. I asked Wavion founder and CTO Dr. Mati Wax about how the two technologies differ, and why Wavion’s approach would overcome that firm’s technology problem. First, he noted, Vivato used analog antenna technology; Wavion does not. Second, Vivato attempted to use different channels closely adjacent to produce multiple beams; Wavion uses the same channel and a single controller to create what they believe will be the necessary separation. Their goal is zero energy at the non-targeted clients, Wax said. Wax said this was an extremely complicated task, but one that they are having success with in testing, and will bring to market.

Posted by Glennf at August 7, 2006 2:00 PM

Categories: Metro-Scale Networks

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