Wireless Vendors: An Overview

Aiirmesh Communications is a wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) and pioneer in the industry. The company launched the nation's largest Wi-Fi Hot Zone in 2003, blanketing the city of Cerritos, California, an 8.6 square mile community with over 60,000 residents, with wireless broadband service. Aiirmesh continues to utilize the latest in Wi-Fi, WiMAX and other robust technologies to design and deploy metro-scale broadband networks for communities across the county.

BelAir Networks features wireless networking solutions that are built on a patented cellular LAN architecture, which integrates wireless access with wireless backhaul in an innovative multi-radio mesh to provide a high-capacity wireless backbone. To create the mesh, Belair Networks uses unique, outdoor wireless internetworking platforms that beam Wi-Fi signals into buildings from the outside. Multiple backhaul radios in each node are configured point-to-point with directional antennas. Each node can connect to multiple others and the combined connections form the wireless backhaul mesh.

Cisco Metropolitan Mobile Network solutions enable public sector agencies to deploy a secure, scalable, broadband network that integrates wired and wireless IP infrastructures and provides local government and transit agencies with a secure broadband citywide network. Cisco Metropolitan Mobile Network solutions enhance security, improve communications and responsiveness, and enable new applications by extending intelligent information network services from the wired infrastructure to the wireless IP network.

Cohda Wireless Mobile Broadband is a developer and supplier of multi-hopping digital wireless communications products, which enable new mobile field applications. Focused on public safety clients, Cohda enables such applications as real time incident video, through reliable high bandwidth communications capability while traveling at high speeds.

Firetide was launched in 2003 to provide equipment for quickly, easily, and affordably deploying large Wireless Instant Networks. Firetide solutions support existing public "hotspots" and the company is developing instant networking technology that will deliver everywhere, all-the-time wireless data communication services to hotzones and hotregions.

LocustWorld, Bio-Diverse Networking Unleashed, has a vision of a world where communities download free software and organically develop a mesh network. Located in the UK, LocustWorld is an early mover on the global market.

MeshDynamics is an early entrant in the mesh networking world, starting in 2002. The website of Mesh Dynamics stresses the technological advantages of its products for scalability and capacity.

PacketHop describes their difference from standard mesh network vendors: Conventional wireless broadband networking is dependent on fixed access points and centralized, network-based servers. Fixed 802.11 networks have their shortcomings, as users are tethered to access points and hindered by bounded coverage, limited roaming, latency and single points of failure. The PacketHop™ Communication System changes the landscape by making infrastructure completely optional.

Telabria designs and manufactures the mSystem range of outdoor mesh products that utilize multi-radio technology to create scalable wireless network solutions. These include CampusMesh™ for local area Wi-Fi coverage, CityMesh™ for metro-scale hot zones, and MobileMesh™ for portable Wi-Fi access using 3G cellular backhaul.

Tropos Networks Installed in over 200 customer sites worldwide, Tropos Networks' MetroMesh architecture includes the innovative and patented Tropos MetroMesh OS with Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP(TM)), the Tropos Control element manager software suite and purpose-built outdoor, mobile and indoor MetroMesh routers. Started over 5 years ago, Tropos is a pioneer and leader in metropolitan wireless networks, whose wireless mesh dynamically routes traffic along the highest throughput path to the Internet, which scales to thousands of nodes with the lowest routing overhead in the industry, not exceeding 5% of available bandwidth regardless of network size, and features the industry's only purpose-built mesh routing protocol built on the important principal of optimizing client-server throughput.