I'm Bob Artner from TechRepublic, and if you're lucky comingto a city near you is a new way to go wireless. It uses the technology we'vetalked about here before. It's called mesh networks.
Since it's tennis season and I'm going to use my tennisracket to illustrate how mesh networks are different than regular networks. Ifyou can see all the strings in this racket imagine that each one of theintersections of these was a small powered station to provide wireless service.Here's what I mean. Imagine a city, and if you're providing regular wirelessservice, what you do is you build towers in different locations and maybe youconnect them into a central location and then anybody who wants to use service,if they're here or if they're, you know, here, here, each place uses the samebandwidth available to this tower, so as more people are in this area thebandwidth available for each of them declines.
Now let's take this tennis racket and assume that this is amesh network providing service to a municipality and I'm only going to do thisfor a small portion, but let's use this as a grid to provide a series of verysmall powered wireless stations on a mesh network and I'll do about 12 or 15 ofthese just so I can illustrate the point. Okay, now as you can see, imaginethat I've done this for the entire city. Each one of these only providesservice for a very small area. What are the advantages is, if one of these goesdown, just eliminates, there's still enough redundancy in the system tocontinue providing service and, since each area is so small there aren't asmany bandwidth congestion problems because people are going to be moving in andout of those individual ranges very quickly.
So what are the advantages that a mesh network offers a cityif it's trying to go wireless? Well, there are three main ones. First of all,cost. This thing is kind of intuitive because you have many more towers tobuild, but each one of these stations is much less expensive than buildingthese big cellular towers.
What's another advantage? Reliability, because we mentionedthere is so much redundancy built into the system that they could be much morereliable than traditional wireless.
And third, cities are in a unique position to install thesebecause they already have the rights of way. In other words, they've installedstreetlights, they've installed light poles, they've put up traffic signs allover the place, and you could use those to actually be the bases for puttingthese stations up. So a city is in a unique position to use its own right ofway to provide wireless access.
So that's the technology behind using mesh networks for citywireless. Now, the politics behind it are a different story altogether andwe'll talk about that some other time.
