Yesterday’s New York Times featured an article by Professor Randall Stross about an way to provide wireless broadband Internet connections using repeaters and mesh networks.
Many of my students use wireless routers at home that run one or more varieties of WiFi or 802.11 networking. An individual router placed inside a building can cover an area that is limited by the strength of the router’s radio, the walls of the building, and other factors.
Of course, a wireless router needs some sort of connection to the Internet. For most users in Hawaii, they use a landline connection provided by Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner cable modems, or Hawaiian Telcom’s DSL service.
While many users connect their cable modem or DSL modem directly to their computer, it’s much safer to plug that Internet connection into an intermediate device called a router. The router can provide a firewall that limits external access to the computers connected to the router, while the router manages and controls the computers’ access to the Internet. Home routers can also create a local area network (LAN) that lets users in a household share files and printers.
WiMax systems like Clearwire use cell phone towers to blanket a geographic area. This is an outside-in approach, because the signal might not penetrate very far into a building. Clearwire modems use a directional antenna that provides a good signal as long as the modem is close to an exterior window.
Of course, users can connect a Clearwire modem to a WiFi router to implement a wireless network, but Intel has been developing chips that will let portable computers use WiMax signals.
The Times article discusses how wireless routers can be tied together in a mesh network, so that each router repeats the signals of neighboring devices. This allows a mesh network to provide reception for a building from the inside-out, and helps eliminate the signal strength issues that wireless users often encounter in the real world.
As more users purchase a repeater device and add it to the network, the mesh network becomes stronger and more robust. Meraki is field-testing a system that, in one implementation in Portland, Oregon, used 400 wireless routers to share the bandwidth of 5 DSL connections among hundreds of apartments. This isn’t enough bandwidth for the dedicated Warcraft player, YouTube viewer or a small business, but it will handle users who want to check e-mail or retrieve simple web pages.
Meraki has two versions of its repeater device in developement: an indoor device for US$49, and a ruggedized outdoor device for US$99. This cost doesn’t cover the final connection to the Internet. The service could be donated, or the cost could be shared among users.
IS 6100 students should note that this is an interesting combination of hardware discussed in chapters 3 and 6, along with a great example of how a mesh network (p 231 in our IS 6100 textbook) might actually be deployed.
IS 7010 students should note that the Meraki mesh network is a disruptive technology that overcomes the “last 10 yards” issue discussed in the Times article. Intel is a major backer of the unapproved mobile version of WiMax. Meraki devices could use a fixed WiMax connection, but they don’t have to, as the test implementation shows.
Repeater devices would also cut into the subscription base of cable modem and DSL providers. All a repeater does is receive a signal and repeat it at a higher strength to another connection. Repeaters are used to provide radio and television signals to the neighbor islands in the state of Hawaii.
The terms of services for these cable and DSL carriers usually prohibit users from sharing their Internet connection, and this prohibition might also cover mesh networks. These carriers have built their network on the assumption that individual apartments our homes would each pay for a device and a direct Internet connection to the carrier.
However, telecom companies could use mesh networks like Meraki’s to provide broadband coverage through entire buildings and neighborhoods with a minimal investiment in wiring and infrastructure. DSL uses existing telephone wiring, but the subscriber must be close enough to receive a good landline signal. Time Warner Cable uses its own wired repeaters to propogate a signal throughout a building a neighborhood, but this equipment is expensive, must be maintained, and must be located on a building or neighborhood’s cable television lines.
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