Testing a Cellular Approach to Wi-Fi

5G Wireless Solutions says that it has begun testing an innovative approach to larger scale broadband wireless deployments utilizing a new base station design. The company's new Cellular Approach to Wi-Fi is designed to further extend the range of its existing Campus-Wide Area Network (C-WAN) products and accelerate municipal Wi-Fi HotZone deployments, both in the U.S. and abroad.

The new antenna array resembles a cellular base station in that it divides a large geographic area into 120 degree sectors and optimizes the range of each sector to maximize coverage. The individual sector antennas can be mounted alongside cellular mountings without interference. The initial range of the 802.11b/g base station to most wirelessly enabled portable devices can be up to 4 km in b mode and up to 1.5 km in g mode.

The benefits of increased range are significant as gains in distance result in exponential increases in overall area, suggesting an emerging new metric for evaluating infrastructure investments: cost per sq. foot of wireless coverage.

"This further enhances our 'less is more' value proposition by dramatically reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in large-scale wireless deployments," stated Carl Weisman, 5G Wireless Sr. Engineer and author of "The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless" (Prentice Hall, 2002). "We're not only reducing the required capital expenditures, but, more important, we're dramatically reducing operating expenditures through reduced network administration and maintenance. We believe our cellular approach to Wi-Fi is the first of its kind, and will be made available to a broad array of campus-like venues and municipalities. What's also exciting is that cellular service carriers now represent an emerging target market for us as they could soon be offering broadband in combination with their existing cellular operations, creating a potential new revenue model."

The base stations are constructed in 120 degree sectors and can be used as individual deployments that can be mounted alongside cellular deployments, without interference issues, either on the side of buildings or as 360 degree mono-pole installations. The new 360 degree, 3-panel antenna arrays will have the ability to simultaneously handle backhaul in the 5.3 and 5.8 gig range and handle local Wi-Fi distribution in the 2.4 range 802.11 b and g modes. The first unit has just been installed at the company's Marina del Rey facility and is currently in testing phase with plans to ship Q3, 2005."

Posted to the site on 2nd June 2005