Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Good news for WiSIP phones

Computerworld | 802.11s tackles mesh networks

Joanie Wexler, Network World
22/06/2004 13:41:28

In case you haven't heard, the wireless LAN industry is now up to 's' in the alphabet soup of 802.11 technical standard extensions.

802.11s aims to define a MAC and PHY for meshed networks that improve coverage with no single point of failure. In such networks, 802.11 cellular WLAN access points relay information from one to another, hop by hop, in a router-like fashion. As you add users and access points, you add capacity. So, as in the Internet, adding nodes becomes a scalable and redundant endeavor.

Meshed networks can serve as indoor or outdoor networks run by wireless ISPs or enterprises with large outdoor deployments. For example, municipalities might wish to extend their fiber networks wirelessly, using fiber-to-wireless gateways. 802.11 meshes might also serve the outdoor portions of campus networks or all-outdoor enterprises such as construction sites.

Among the vendors that make products for these applications are BelAir Networks, Firetide, Nortel and Tropos Networks. Another company, RoamAD, also makes outdoor products, but currently sells them exclusively to the service provider market.

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