Xirrus

ALSO NOTED: Xirrus planning 802.11n access points; AirCell partners with Virgin America for in-flight WiFi; and much more...

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:59:51 -0400

> Xirrus is developing a WiFi access point that can support up to 16 802.11n-compatible radios. Article

> WiChorus has raised $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding, which has brought its total VC to $25 million. Article

> AirCell has announced it is partnering with Virgin America to offer WiFi Internet services on the airline's flights in the continental U.S. in 2008. Article

> Turkey's Telecommunications Board will meet next week to discuss whether to approve the award of the country's first 3G license to mobile market leader Turkcell. Article

And Finally... Think your phone bill is big? Try $218 trillion. Article

Letter to the Editor: Let's get muni-WiFi and WiMAX players together

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:03:31 -0400

Lynnette Luna’s suggestion, “Let's get muni-WiFi and WiMAX players together,” (Fierce Broadband Wireless, August 23, 2007) sounds sensible enough. However, to mix the National Football League and Gertrude Stein: Upon further review, there’s no there there.

Why? Two reasons. First, for at least the next few years, i.e., the length of time that a network installed today can reasonably expected to remain in place, Wi-Fi will remain the wireless technology of choice for client connections. Second, aside from client connections, specific technologies don’t matter.

Let’s examine each of these assertions.

According to Xirrus, there are more 300 million WiFi clients in the world today. This number is growing rapidly, with at least 20 million new clients shipping each quarter. Shipments are likely to accelerate with the advent of dual-mode WiFi/3G handsets. In-Stat forecasts that more than 200 million dual-mode WiFi/cellular handsets will have shipped by 2010. For example, Apple alone is expected to ship more than 1 million WiFi-equipped iPhones in the first two quarters after its introduction.

With WiMAX largely passing 802.16d by, the only truly viable WiMAX technology is 802.16e. Yet, a leading WiMAX market research analyst recently told me that only about 60,000 802.16e client devices had been shipped, in total, through the end of Q1-2007.

Compared to the installed base of WiFi clients, that’s rounding error. In a game where the score is 300 million to rounding error, 300 million wins. The power of WiFi’s installed base will trump whatever technical advantages that WiMAX may (or may not) have for client connections.

The situation for WiMAX clients is unlikely to change anytime soon. The August 24, 2007 edition of Fierce Wireless reports that Current Analysis analyst Peter Jarich talked about how he believes Sprint may have set itself up for trouble because of its “inflated” expectations for WiMAX. Jarich says that Sprint can't control the electronics industry, so consumers may be disappointed when they don't find WiMAX-embedded MP3 players or gaming devices available right away.

It should be noted that better in-building penetration is NOT one of WiMAX’s advantages. Operating in roughly the same spectrum as WiFi (2.5 GHz for WiMAX versus 2.4 GHz for Wi-Fi) and using the same encoding (OFDM), WiMAX’s ability to penetrate buildings is roughly the same as Wi-Fi’s. The higher power of the licensed band will offer a slight advantage to WiMAX but it’s the equivalent of penetrating one additional wall – hardly an elixir for indoor penetration ills.

But, even if WiMAX isn’t widely used for client connections, won’t it dominate the connections beyond the client link into the core of the network? In a word, no.

For sure, WiMAX will be one of the technologies used for various forms of backhaul. However, it will not dominate that field because, aside from the client connection, the specific technology employed simply doesn’t matter. Anything that gets the job done will suffice.

Consider for a moment your cell phone. You may know that it connects to a cell tower using CDMA or GSM. But, do you have any idea what kind of technology is used to backhaul that cell tower? Do you care? Of course not! Further, if you needed to know or care, you probably wouldn’t use a cell phone.

The same applies to wireless data services. WiFi will be the pipe to the client. What’s behind that pipe does not and must not matter to the user. If it doesn’t matter to the users, muni wireless network operators, whether municipalities themselves or service providers providing service to municipalities, are free to choose whatever technology offers the best combination of features, performance and price for the application.

In some cases, especially where the network operator holds a license for spectrum, the choice will be WiMAX. In many other cases, the network operator will find that other wireless technologies, including the myriad proprietary offerings on the market, will better suit their needs. This will be especially true in cases where the operator does not hold a spectrum license or does not want to use licensed spectrum for this particular application.

Given that WiMAX will not be widely used for client connections and that it is only one of many good backhaul choices, it is hard to build a compelling case that municipal leaders should expend the effort needed to enter what would inevitably be protracted negotiations with Sprint or Clearwire to tailor their WiMAX networks to meet municipal needs. A far better use of time and effort would be for civic leaders to examine building and operating their own wireless network for city use (and NOT for residential access!) or working with service providers whose business models support anchor tenancy by municipalities and Wi-Fi client connections. -Bert Williams

Bert Williams is the vice president of marketing with Proxim.

ALSO NOTED: Ntelos awards Alcatel-Lucent EV-DO contract; BigAir first to launch WiMAX in Australia; and much more...

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 06:59:51 -0400

> Ntelos awarded Alcatel-Lucent a three-year CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev. A contract worth up to $88.2 million in equipment. Article

> BigAir Group launched Australia's first WiMAX network in Sydney and Melbourne using Airspan Networks' base stations. Release

> Xirrus said it will deploy a WiFi network for Boulder Valley School District in Colorado. Release

And Finally... What's an iPhone worth in Canada? Article

ALSO NOTED: Cellular to WiFi roaming; Wi-FiTV; and much more...

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 19:01:31 -0500

> Aepona announced its solution for cellular to WiFi roaming, based on the 3GPP Voice Call Continuity (VCC) specifications. Report

> Kirtech is showing a new WiFiID system which combines RFID and WiFi aiming to be of help in tracking patients, doctors, expensive equipment or controlled drugs in hospitals in real time. Report

> Wi-FiTV got 7.5 million hits to its social Internet TV site in December and January. They have an interesting business model. Press release

> Xirrus says it received high marks from the Tolly Group after the latter tested Xirrus's WiFi Array products. Report

And finally... The spirit of the 1960s lives: The Liberator is a glorified USB WiFI dongle that acts as a relay that makes a private network public. If you sit at your local Starbucks and you have a T-Mobile HotSpot data plan you can use the Liberator to share your Internet connection with the other users in the shop. We don't even know whether it's legal, but then, many things in the 1960s were not, and were still fun. Details

ALSO NOTED: Linksys launches 802.11n in India; WiFi comes to trains in FL; and much more...

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:01:31 -0400

> Linksys launches 802.11n in India. Report

> Florida's TriRail is testing WiFi for passengers. Report

> San Francisco is not the only city facing WiFi hurdles--so is Chicago. Report

> Xirrus has been awarded a patent for its WiFi array design. Report

And finally... The competitive marketplace may be risky, but government control is a worse fate. Microsoft has learned this the hard way and Google's problems with building a citywide WiFi network show that these big companies never learn. Analysis

SPOTLIGHT: Thin is in--but which thin?

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 20:01:33 -0400

There is a general move away from fat, intelligent, stand-alone APs in WLAN design toward a centrally switched architecture (see story #4 above). There are several reasons for this change of direction: Security became an issue, as was the need to allow for cross-subnet roaming. There were other issues having to do with scalability and control. Yes, you could buy gateways from Blusocket or Cisco to help manage the distributed network, but more and more businesses realized that a better way was to manage a series of thin APs by using wireless switches. As Craig Mathias notes, however, there are several different architectures which feature the wireless switch-thin AP combination (just compare the designs of Meru Networks, Extricom and Xirrus). As businesses weigh what WLAN to buy next, they should consider not only features such as throughput and security, but also WLAN architecture. Discussion

Trend: Bonded wireless for back haul

Tue, 09 May 2006 20:01:38 -0400

Meru is a company which likes to make news. At last year's Interop it offered "single channel WLANs" (together with Extricom). This year, the big new idea seems to be wireless backbones--systems in which wireless links push the wires one step further back toward the wiring closet. And, yes, Meru is pushing it with a system which bonds channels to make a 100 Mbps back haul from APs to distribution switches. Not only Meru: Xirrus also talked of a bonded back haul for enterprise WLANs, in the form of a software upgrade--Release 2.0--of its Integrated Access Point, which bonds three radios together for links which it claims are up to 162 Mbps. The software will be available at the end of May.

The Meru and Xirrus systems offer a bonded channel, with greater capacity than a normal WiFi link, and both offer features above and beyond what we typically see in a regular mesh. Meru's system offers a full-duplex link with quality of service, which Meru's director of product management says is different from a mesh. Xirrus' system appears to be faster, but the 162 Mbps may well be based on multiplying the theoretical 54 Mbps rate of three 802.11g channels by three. The actual throughput is likely to be half of what the company claims it to be.

Note also that Meru uses a "blanket" architecture, in which the APs all use the same WLAN channel(s). The bonded back channel benefits from the fact that with all the APs using specific channels, other channels are free for back haul. Xirrus, on the other hand, uses a sectorized architecture in which one AP contains up to 16 radios, which use directional antennas to reach a wedge of the building. The Xirrus sectorized architecture thus makes it possible to bond channels together without danger of their interfering with radios which are beaming out in a different direction.

For more on bonded channels for back haul:
- see Peter Judge's Techworld report

ALSO NOTED: Rise of the WiFi thug; Public access WLAN services in Asia; and much more...

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 20:00:50 -0400

> The rise of the WiFi thug -- read and beware. Story

> Public access WLAN services in Asia are now mostly provided by telcos and mobile operators; in North Asia, they are perceived as a value add for subscriber customers. Report

> Xirrus enhances VoWiFi support. Release

> Vivato shows its new VA4200 tri-mode 802.11a/b/g AP/bridge. Release

> Motorola, Cisco team on enterprise mobility. Story

> T-Mobile Netherlands gives live demonstration of HSDPA in practice. Story

> Linksys shows wireless-G broadband router with SRX. Story

> Americatel Peru to build WiMax-ready network in Latin America using Alvarion's BreezeMAX. Report

And Finally... Not for nothing did Intel's Andrew Grove title his autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive; security experts suggest you could do worse than adopt this approach to your wireless network. Discussion

Bountiful WiFi shows range-enhancing AP

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 20:01:34 -0400

Woods Cross, Utah-based Bountiful WiFi (yes, this is the company's name; its motto is: "Abundant and Constant") is showing a new AP which, the company claims, doubles or even quadruples the range offered by available WiFi gear. Bountiful WiFi CEO, David Egbert, used to work for Corco which, three years ago, developed a stand-alone WiFi signal booster for Linksys. When Cisco acquired Linksys two years ago,the boosting idea was dropped, so Egbert decided to pick it up in his new start-up. Bountiful relies on an 802.11g chipset from Atheros as the basis of a router which will "put out as much power as the FCC will allow," Egbert told Unstrung. "As much power" means close to 30 dBm gain, which, in turn, means that the Bountiful router should have a range of about 1,000 feet. This is enough power, the company says, to cover a two-floor office. The system also has sensitive receivers, allowing a linear radio amplifier to perform well in obstacle-rich environments.

Other companies have also recently released products which enhance the range and reach of WiFi networks, among them Meru Networks and Xirrus.

For more on Bountiful's latest release
-see company's site
-Dan Jones's Unstrung report
For more on recent coverage-enhancing WiFi products
-see this report

AirMagnet shows multi-tasking sensored headline

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 20:01:37 -0400

AirMagnet is enhancing its support for Cisco APs in AirMagnet Enterprise 6. It is also offering multi-tasking sensors, simplifying set-up, and adding intelligence to spot new attacks. "You can now use Cisco APs as scanners," AirMagnet's Rich Mironov told Techworld. "That's a little less than a sensor, it is not a full-function analytical device, but the AP can become a full-time dedicated scanner on all channels." The company's probes are also integreated in other multi-radio APs, such as those offered by Xirrus and Colubris.

The new software allows sensors to block rogue APs while continuing to look for other trouble. The sensors are set up remotely by the AirMagnet server. "As each sensor is plugged in it will make DNS request to find server and get connected up," said Mironov. "That's not a big deal if you are putting twenty sensors out, but if you are putting 1,000 out on four continents, it's a big help."

For more on AirMagnet's new enhancements:
- see Peter Judge's Techworld report

PLUS: AirMagnet has added "Day Zero" alarms, prompting software to raise an alarm when an unusual traffic pattern indicates the network is under attack. This is especially effective against "phlooding attacks," which target central authentication servers. Release