Wireless cities emerge at last

IT'S AN UNSTOPPABLE trend. Cities all over the world are setting up municipal WiFi networks to ensure residents are constantly bathed in the educational rays of the wireless Internet.

Well, it might be more accurate to say that cities all over the world are talking about setting up municipal WiFi. A few of them are actually doing it, but things are not going as fast as you'd expect from hearing all that talk, because local governments are slow to spend taxpayers' money (a more cruel commentator might just say they're slow).

One of the major expenses of large scale WiFi networks, says Andy Chen of Z-Com Inc, is the cost of connecting all the wireless access points together, so that they can all be plugged into the Internet. You could argue that systems like Fon, which use ordinary folks' access points to provide WiFi for all, avoid this problem. If you did, I would point out that city officials and corporations will, unfortunately, flee screaming from the potential legal liability implications of such a sensible system.

So the connectivity problem remains. Some cities, such as Taipei, have opted for a mesh network, in which neighboring access points use WiFi to link to each other, and so save on expensive cables. But WiFi has very limited range, so for this to work well, you need to put lots of nodes close together. This makes your network rollout rather inflexible It also forces you to blanket the area with nodes - so a single failure won't leave part of the network isolated - and it's wasteful in less densely-populated areas.

You won't be surprised to hear that Z-Com's Andy Chen thinks he has a solution to this dilemma. Nor will you be surprised to learn that it is coincidentally made by his very own company - now you understand why they made him the sales manager. It's the Z-Com WiMAX to WiFI Mesh outdoor gateway.

This does the same mesh networking trick as Taipei's WiFly wireless network, but it uses WiMax to link the access points together. Which means they can easily be kilometers, rather than meters, apart. It could also provide WiMax access, if required, and, as you probably figured out already, one day it could be used to let old WiFi-only gadgets share some of the benefits of a full WiMax network, (as soon as someone implements one somewhere).

Chen makes an interesting comparison with GSM and other phone networks, which, he says, use a similar dual-band approach to linking base stations. The WiMax/WiFi combo might work nicely with a wireless VOIP phone network as well, he hints.

Scheduled for mass production in the fourth quarter, with a price tag below $1000 each, according to Andy Chen. µ

L'INQ
zcom.com.tw