Wave Wireless has been granted FCC certification for its 2.4 Ghz SPEEDLAN 9000 product line. Users can choose between a self-healing mesh, point-to-multipoint with a polling base station, or a simple building-to-building deployment. It can be re-deployed as their needs may change and utilizes AES encryption.
SPEEDLAN 9101 and 9104 are mesh-only products used to deploy a mesh network. SPEEDLAN 9102 and 9103 can be configured as a simple building-to-building backbone, a point-to-multipoint “star” topology or as a self-healing mesh topology. Products range in price from $899 to $1799. A Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) server, DHCP client, and Network Address Translation (NAT) functions are built in to each unit. Wave Wireless is a division of Speedcom which supplies “backbone” and/or “last-mile” wireless connectivity at speeds from 11 Mbps up to 155 Mbps over distances of 25 miles or more.
Commercial “mesh” competitors in the 2.4 Ghz band include Nokia’s RoofTop Wireless mesh network and Wireless Router. Nokia’s mesh system enables neighbors to share an access link, automatically linking to nearby nodes if an internet backbone is not directly available. Nokia’s mesh system is being used by Vista Broadband, in California. Customers pay $45 and up a month plus a $200 account initiation/install fee. The entry-level package delivers data rates up to 384 Kbps. Nokia’s RoofTop customer premises equipment costs about $800 while the neighborhood hub device sells for about $1,200. The Nokia AIR Operating System controls a built-in RF amplifier to help make scaling the network simple and automatic.
The IEEE 802.16a working group is defining a standardized mesh extension (pdf) in the 5 Ghz band.
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