The Town of Los Gatos and the Los Gatos Opera House have launched a free public outdoor WiFi HotZone. A newly-renovated downtown park is the site of the HotZone with free WiFi donated from the Opera House located across the street.
“We now have another exciting reason for residents and visitors to come to our charming and vibrant downtown,” said Mayor Sandy Decker. “We’re also fortunate to have such a forward-thinking and generous business like the Opera House as a partner with the Town.”
The partnership between the Opera House and the Town came about after the Town Council suggested private businesses take the lead in establishing more WiFi HotZones in the downtown. The Opera House was the first to respond by offering free public Internet access in the park.
Endorsing the idea of free WiFi access throughout the downtown, the Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce is encouraging other businesses to follow suit. “WiFi in the Town park is a great example of local businesses offering our citizens the ability to enjoy downtown and still engage in their high-tech lifestyle,” said Phil Johnson, President of the Chamber.
Firetide (above), a Los Gatos-based company, is providing and maintaining the WiFi equipment in the Plaza. The Firetide Wireless Instant Network uses Ethernet backhaul and creates a self-configuring, self-healing mesh network.
Mesh networking is in fashion. Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco, has deployed 8 to 10 Wi-Fi hot spots using Tropos Networks meshed WiFi as well as Downtown Baton Rouge and the San Mateo Police Department. These metro-scale, Wi-Fi mesh network use land-line connections at some of the hot spots while the rest use mesh-like interconnections. Aiirnet will use Tropos units with 802.16 backhaul at various spots. MIT is explored meshed Roofnets while Verilan used Mesh networking in Tigard.
Aiirlink has teamed with Tropos to create a three-to-30 mile “hot zone” in which subscribers can have free-roaming access to wireless broadband. This service is ideal for a community that was considered too rural or falling just outside of larger cities’ networks or has not yet become wired for fixed broadband.
Aiirlink has targeted a number of cities, towns and districts meeting this criteria, and is also working closely with the Rural Broadband Coalition (RBC) to identify the broadband needs of Rural America, which encompasses 75 percent of the land mass of the nation and 25 percent of the population. The Tropos mesh system can be mounted on light and utility poles.
Metricom’s Ricochet service, planned wireless Internet access in a dozen U.S. cities in 2000, but fell on hard times. It delivered 128-kilobit per second wireless service but required a proprietary (900Mhz) radio and used 2.4 GHz only for the node-to-node “mesh”. TechDirt says the newly reborn Ricochet service appears to be on the verge of shutting down (again).
PacketHop, doesn’t make hardware but rather the software to run the mesh networks. PacketHop runs on standard Internet Protocol with standard 802.11 radios. Routing protocols are similar to TCP/IP but the PacketHop mesh will also incorporates solutions for security, Quality of Services (QoS) and network management. Their technology is based in part on patents from SRI International. The Mobile Ad-hoc Network Working Group (MANET) of the Routing Area of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working on standards.
Locustworld, an open source mesh networking organization has a MeshBox X2 for sale. It features dual internal radios, two magnetic omni-directional antenna and 64mb on-board flash memory.
Auckland, New Zealand, is unwired using RoamAD, a Cellular Wi-Fi/mesh network access solution. Users can roam anywhere in the downtown core area. The technology is 100% compatible with 802.11b, end-users can connect to the RoamAD network with any Wi-Fi device. RoamAD says building a 50-square-kilometer system will require about 800 access points and cost 5% of the expense of a comparable 3G rollout.
The Wireless Athens Project, one of the first “unwired cities” in the U.S., uses 5 Ghz to connect to 802.11b access points mounted on ten utility poles in the downtown area. It’s using a more typical approach – a centralized hub feeds several hot spots with a 5 GHz backbone. Mesh has an advantage when hot spots can’t “see” the hub – signals can be relayed through neighboring hotspots/routers until an internet backbone is “found”.
Other “unwired” cities include Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Bellevue & Kirkland, OneCleveland, Pittsburgh, Datona Beach, Hermosa Beach, Long Beach and others.
4G Clouds in the United States using systems like Navini, Flarion, Arraycomm or others in the MMDS band (2.6 GHZ), claim to deliver 1Mbps to non line-of-sight mobilized users over a distance of 3-5 miles.
Louisville, Kentucky, is expected to be the first city in the United States to have a complete metro-area network powered by Navini. Navini also Beamed Up Florida & Texas, Mobilized Seoul and Large Parts of Australia. Clearwire is also providing broadband wireless services.
A standardizing effort on the part of 802.16e (for MMDS and 5.8GHz) and 802.20 (using licensed frequencies below 3.5 GHz), promises practical “city clouds” using fewer “hot spots” (but would require an 802.16e or 802.20 radio card).
Meanwhile, 802.16a aims to provide backhaul to hundreds of 802.11a/g hot spots mounted on buildings or utility poles. It may, however, take a few years before costs of 802.16a backhaul from hotspots can be justified and competitive with DSL or cable modems. Meanwhile, mesh networking could be a solution. It can link nearby hot spots cost/effectively and eliminates the requirement for each hot spot to be wired to broadband.
Building city-wide Wi-Fi networks is one thing. Managing Large Scale Networks is another. Sputnick Central Control, for example, manages up to 20 APs for $895. The backend; should also be considered. Will users best be served by IBM’s WebSphere, Microsoft Windows .Net, Java or an Open Source variant.
