Motorola announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Orthogon Systems, a high-performance fixed wireless solution. The addition will expand Motorola’s MOTOwi4 portfolio of wireless broadband solutions.
Orthogon, headquartered in Ashburton, England, is known for their award-winning wireless Ethernet bridges. Orthogon says their products achieve considerable reduction in fade margin, resulting in greater range and a much higher probability of making a link by using Multi-Beam Space-Time Coding and Intelligent OFDM and Intelligent DFS (dynamic frequency selection) to overcome obstacles and provide a reliable link.
Their 5.4 GHz and 5.8GHz OS-Gemini wireless Ethernet bridge solutions as well a 5.8 GHz OS-Spectra broadband radio. Both the OS-Gemini and the OS-Spectra offer a “Lite” version with half of the data rate of its full counterpart at a reduced price. The Gemini Lite can achieve 21 Mbps as compared to 43 Mbps for the full Gemini. OS-Spectra can aggregate throughput up to 300 Mbps on a 30 MHz channel.
The OS-MUX allows users to transport legacy TDM traffic over the OS-Gemini wireless Ethernet bridge. With the flexibility of two or four E1/T1 ports plus two Ethernet ports. The Orthogon OS-Gemini starts at $12,000; OS-Gemini Lite starts at $7,200. OS-MUX, available for both the 5.4GHz and 5.8GHz products, starts at $9,705.
“Orthogon is at the forefront of innovation in wireless OFDM point-to-point solutions and is highly complementary to Motorola’s MOTOwi4 wireless broadband capabilities,” said Greg Brown, President, Motorola’s Networks and Enterprise business.
Motorola has an existing minority equity investment in Orthogon, which was driven by its venture capital arm, Motorola Ventures. Motorola has been a distributor of Orthogon’s products through its Canopy business since 2004.
Motorola also announced they will support the final 802.11s meshing standard being developed by the IEEE, 802.11s. Motorola says its customers will be able to configure their MeshConnex powered products to be compliant with the 802.11s standard via over-the-air software downloads. Motorola’s MeshConnex technology powers a wide variety of the company’s products, including its Mesh Enabled Architecture (MEA) and MOTOMESH multi-radio broadband systems.
