IT Architect rounds up the state of mesh networking: Six vendors are in the space, Andy Dornan writes: BelAir, Cisco, Firetide, Motorola (mesh division), Tropos, and Strix. He divides them into four categories: metro-area (Tropos and BelAir), indoor with newer outdoor options (Firetide and Strix), proprietary client (Motorola), and central management (Cisco).
Dornan also divides up the companies by how many radios they use. With one radio, such as in Tropos's nodes, the number of hops to backhaul is limited, but it does keep per-unit costs lower. More radios means fewer locations for backhaul, as with units offered by Strix or Motorola. (Motorola's Canopy division, of course, specializes in backhaul, and EarthLink's municipal network design will use clusters of Tropos nodes in mesh formation backhauled via Canopy transceivers to aggregate backhaul to central points.)
The lack of a standard means no interoperability, but 802.11s is underway at the IEEE and may result in indoor interoperability. It's possible 802.11s will help just at the CPE (customer premises equipment) level rather than intranodally, too.
As a Service Provider evaluating and testing these products for the last 16 Months I would submit the following corrections to Andys attempt to categorize these vendors:
Wireless Mesh market positioning of vendors:
1. Large Metro/County and State Wide Mesh Networks: Strix dominates this space with it's 4 and 6 Radio Nodes.
2. Medium and Small Metro size deployments: Strix and Belair (2 Radio system) would share this space. Belair costs/meg/node are still high, but the elegance of their product design is noted.
3. Small Metro and or Large Campus/Enterprise Markets: Tropos, with Belair and Strix fitting in nicely as well.
The above positioning is based on what we feel is going to be the case when these Mesh Networks begin experiencing the heavy draw from the emerging Voice/Music and Video service coming along that will begin to compete with the Police/Fire and Muni workers using these new networks.
Other vendors products:
Cisco Mesh: I have not had an opportunity to evaluate the new Cisco/Airespace Mesh (2 Radio) product in our labs/field, but feel by limiting itself to a 2 radio node they will fit in the Small to Medium and campus space-assuming they can justify the heavy burden (Cost) of their WLAN COntrollers. By being Cisco they will win their share of all these markets.
Firetide: Do not know much about or have heard anything about this products success in the market YTD.
4. Indoor Wireless Mesh products: Strix again takes lead here with a well established product. Interesting new comer in this field-SohoWare has a powerful Indoor Wireless Mesh with MIMO (Airgo) features that (with better marketing and PR) will dominate this space and give Cisco/Airespace a run for this market.
Other comments on Pricing:
Leader in the Cost/Meg/Node is Strix-Even competitive with Tropos here.
SohoWare cost/meg will allow them entre into many large enterprise/convention and public indoor venues.
Jacomo
An interested observer.