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 Tropos Goes to 802.11g By Eric Griffith
April 28, 2005
Tropos Networks, a popular seller of wireless mesh equipment in municipal deployments, this week announced upgrades to various pieces of equipment and the software that runs them. The big news is that after months of selling only 802.11b equipment, the Tropos line of MetroMesh routers will support the faster 802.11g, using chips from Atheros. This includes the brand new units, the 5210 for outdoors and the 3210 for indoors. Also supporting 802.11g will be the mobile MetroMesh unit, the 4210, which Tropos announced weeks ago in conjunction with a deployment with first responders in Oklahoma City (though it won't ship to others until the third quarter). Node sensitivity on all the units has also been increased to 100dBm, which Tropos says will allow them to be placed even farther apart. All the units are single-radio products, in contrast to the close competition at Strix and BelAir, which use multiple radios—some for backhaul, other for client connections. Tropos says that its Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP) is the secret sauce that keeps the single-radio MetroMesh units ahead of the competition; the company feels the others have made a mistake in using 5GHz radios for backhaul. Bert Williams, vice president of marketing at Tropos, says the company isn't against multiple radios in a mesh unit, and sees that as part of its future. They even expect to integrate WiMax for long distances at some point. Williams sees more of a problem in using multiple radio frequency bands. "They eliminate the loss in multi-hop, but don't do anything about packet loss due to errors," he says. "That will cause more retransmission than extra hops can.... we do that with intelligent routing." Tropos says that by using PWRP and 5210 units to cover a square mile, the MetroMesh system is capable of 10 to 15 Mbps of concurrent capacity for users. The cost of such a deployment would be $68,000. Tropos claims the competition could cost almost as much as half a million dollars, because the use of the 5GHz band requires more density of nodes. While Tropos has had major success with over 150 customer deployments to date, there might be some backlash coming. When announcing availability earlier this week of its own outdoor equipment, competitor Strix Systems noted that one of its first major deployments would be as part of the WAZ Tempe network in Tempe, Ariz.—a hotzone previously being tested with Tropos equipment. The latest update from Tropos includes upgrades to the MetroMeshOS for controlling the equipment. The software provides multiple-use capabilities, delivered via virtual LANs (up to 4,095) and virtual SSIDs (up to 16). Security support includes full AES encryption under 802.11i, courtesy of the Atheros chipset. The encryption will secure the signals between the outdoor nodes.
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