Strix Systems has received a strategic investment from Samsung, reports Unstrung.
Strix’s VP of marketing, Nan Chen, says the new money will be spent on “expanding market opportunities and R&D.” Excluding this strategic investment, Strix has so far gathered $54 million in venture funding since its inception in 2000.
According to Unstrung, Strix will work together with Samsung on two fronts:
The first: “Immediate deployment opportunities where the combination of WiFi mesh and WiMax makes sense,” he says. For example, WiFi mesh may need WiMax backhaul, or — more interestingly — WiMax networks may need WiFi mesh backhaul. Unstrung did something of a double-take at this — conventional wireless wisdom has it that WiMax is the technology that will provide the “fat pipe” to backhaul 802.11-based mesh networks, not the other way around. The Strix marketing man says that it ain’t necessarily so.
“That’s right, because WiMax, in current profiles defined by the WiMAX Forum , can’t run faster than the theoretical max of 37.5 Mbit/s, yet current and foreseeable implementations of WiMax are limited to around 20 Mbit/s,” Chen explains. “WiFi mesh with different [so-called smart antenna] techniques or 802.11n can run over 100 Mbit/s. Therefore, WiFi mesh can be a backhaul for WiMax.”
Samsung’s mobile WiMAX gear will be used in Sprint’s Washington DC rollout this year. Sprint is also using Motorola gear in Chicago and Nokia WiMAX headend and terminal gear elsewhere in it’s nationwide WiMAX service, expected to begin in ernest next year.
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