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New Cisco Products Pave Way for Free Muni Wi-Fi
[December 20, 2005]

New Cisco Products Pave Way for Free Muni Wi-Fi


TMCnet Associate Editor

Free municipal Wi-Fi anyone?

You may soon find it in every major city in the U.S.

Cisco Systems today announced that it has developed a set of new products which will make it easier and less expensive for municipalities to deploy free Wi-Fi Internet access over large, outdoor areas. The company claims that by harnessing the power of a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking,” it can set up cities and towns with free public Wi-Fi - something which many city officials now view as essential in order to boost economic development and improve municipal operations.



The new technology was born out of Cisco’s acquisition of Airespace, Inc., a provider of centralized wireless local area network equipment (including mesh architecture), earlier this year. By combining Airespace’s technology with Cisco wireless products, the company developed its “wireless mesh” offering, which takes conventional Wi-Fi “hot spots” and links them together, much the same way routers link the access points on a wired network.

According to a company
news release, the heart of the system is the Cisco Aironet 1500 Series access points, which transmit and receive the wireless signals for connecting laptops and other mobile devices to the Internet or other wired networks. Unlike typical access points used for “hotspot” wireless connections (such as those found in coffee shops, airports and other locations), the Aironet 1500 mesh access points can operate without a direct connection to a wired network. Instead, only one Ethernet cable is needed to connect the Wi-Fi network to a wired network (or perhaps several – but far fewer than would be needed with a conventional Wi-Fi network). This solves the problem of not having enough Ethernet cables in an outdoor setting – something which has always been a limiting factor for wireless deployment.


Wireless mesh access points can use their wireless capabilities to transmit backhaul traffic from one access point to another and out to the Internet. In this way, wireless mesh access points operate much like the router nodes of a wired network, with traffic flowing from one access point to another over the most efficient path. This allows users to roam anywhere where there is a signal: As the user moves out of the range of one access point and into the range of another, the second access point picks up the connection, and so on.

In essence, mesh technology extends Wi-Fi service from “spot” coverage to “blanket” coverage, making it possible for users to be continuously connected while traveling through a large area. Mesh access points can be installed on street lights, power poles or other public infrastructure in a matter of minutes. The only requirement is a source of power.

One advantage of mesh technology is that it makes centralized management much simpler than with previous Wi-Fi technology. For example, if one access point fails, the network can continue to operate just as it did before, only losing reception around the incapacitated access point.

Also, Cisco’s Aironet 1500 access points utilizes a dual radio design (one radio for making the connection with mobile users and another to manage the backhaul traffic flowing among the access points) to provide greater band-width performance and reliability. This sets the Cisco architecture apart from other mesh networks, which use only one radio for both user access and backhaul traffic.

The Cisco adaptive wireless path protocol provides the intelligence for effectively running the Cisco mesh networks. Just as with the routers that serve as the traffic cops of the wired networks, the Aironet 1500 Series access points use sophisticated mathematical algorithms to decide the best ways to route traffic from access point to access point and out to the main wired network.

The new “wireless mesh” products are now part of the Cisco Unified Network architecture, which includes a range of wireless devices and centralized management components for facilitating deployment and reducing the management costs.

For more information, visit Cisco’s website at
www.cisco.com.

Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit
Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.

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