Wi-Fi Switching Bravado from Vivato

"We're doing something that's supposed to be impossible," Belanger said. "It's like RADAR technology applied to Wi-Fi. Our standard unit of measurement is a single beam. On a per packet basis, beams are transporting data to and from active users only. Because these high gain beams are very narrowall around the beam is quiet, so we're increasing range and capacity while reducing interference. We're changing the physics and economics of Wi-Fi technology."

A single Vivato Wi-Fi switch can be deployed over the entire floor of an office building using a single indoor antenna (left), or it can be deployed to an entire office building using a single outdoor antenna that is contained in an environmentally stable box. According to Belanger, an indoor system (that would likely be a three-beam system) will be available for about $10,000 early in 2003. If it costs about $1,000 per AP to deploy a six AP office setup, Vivato's offering could be compelling, since customer premise equipment (CPE) is under $50 per connection.

Similarly, a single outdoor Vivato Wi-Fi switch can be deployed in a campus setting to deliver wireless broadband access to multiple buildings or multiple antennas can be set up to achieve a scaled deployment of wireless hotspots or WISP services (right). Once again, the economics of future WLAN deployments are altered, only this time it's because the Vivato switching system extends the range of Wi-Fi connections from meters to kilometers.

Vivato's Wi-Fi switching technology integrates 802.11-based wireless systems with gigabit Ethernet switching through its revolutionary antenna design that is capable of scaling both Wi-Fi capacity and coverage. To give you an idea of the scale, a single Vivato switch enables secure, wireless broadband Internet access with transfer rates of up to 800 Mbps over a four-mile square area. This means, that a typical office setup that would require five or six conventional wireless APs in order to deliver network connectivity to employees dispersed around a single floor of an office building, could be replaced by one Vivato Wi-Fi switch with a single antenna mounted in the corner of the office area.

While both systems would require nearly the same capital expenditure, Belanger said that Vivato's streamlined system management would win over Wi-Fi wary network administrators.

"Administrators manage one network element instead of many elements, like that of a typical multiple AP setup. Our command line interface is based on Linux, so it's familiar to most sysadmins ," Belanger said. "And enterprise level security is built into the system, but it's flexible. You can use 802.1x with WEP or TKIP. And the system supports PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, as well as pass-through or termination security inherent to VPNs and IPsec. "

Additional features of Vivato's Wi-Fi switching system include:

• Planar phased array antenna: Enables multiple shaped packet beams with space, time and channel multiplexing for increased capacity.
• Narrow packet beams: Transmit and receive with high EIRP transmission over a large aperture for increased sensitivity reception while reducing co-channel interference, since power is beamed only where it is needed.
• Standards agnostic: Supports standard IEEE 802.11 b/a/g client network interfaces
• Expands range: Up to 7 kilometers outdoors with a conventional Wi-Fi client. Up to 2 kilometers to an indoor Wi-Fi client.

When it comes to WISP deployments, Vivato Wi-Fi switches extend the reach of wireless APs beyond mesh networks (below). Service providers benefit from reducing the cost of incremental deployments, as well as an efficient way to setup and manage wireless hotspots. Belanger estimates that the cost for an ISP deployment would run around $50,000 to achieve 100 Mbps of throughput over a 360-degree area under 4-square miles, and remember that CPE costs run only $50 per setup because all that's required is a Wi-Fi client. There's no need for a truck roll or antenna cabling, as with typical customer installations.

Availability

The company anticipates releasing its first products, operating in the 2.4 GHz band, sometime in the first quarter of 2003. Products operating in the 5 GHz band are to follow. Belanger is confident about Vivato's ability to change the nature of WLAN deployments in the enterprise, if not hotspots and last-mile WISP operations.

"We turn hotspots into hot zones," Belanger said. "We scale Wi-Fi to the enterprise and beyond while delivering a low cost of ownership with enterprise-class security and management."

Only time will tell if the industry buys into Vivato's intelligent Wi-Fi switching technology. But if businesses, Internet service providers, and hotspot builders switch gears as quickly as Vivato switches beams, this could be the start of something big.

Patricia Fusco is the managing editor of ISP-Planet.

Reprinted from ISP-Planet.