New last-mile solution using hacked 802.11 cards?
4John Markoff at The New York Times is reporting on
Etherlinx, a company that claims to have
significantly extended the range of wireless broadband by hacking the
firmware of current 802.11b cards and running CPEs (customer premises equipment) with 2 cards inside -
one card that runs their software radio (non-standard, not 802.11b
protocols) and one that retransmits signals into a house or other local
broadband endpoint. They claim 2MBps speeds in field trials they’ve
been conducting in Oakland.
Certainly, this is somthing that needs further investigation. The
company claims all sorts of neat stuff, including security, QoS, and
other features. This can be performed in the CPE, probably not at the
radio layer. The CPE can also be built very cheaply, and sold at about a $100 price point. A number of questions remain – are they using FHSS
(old-fashioned 802.11 signals maxed out at 2Mbps and were FHSS) or
DSSS? How do the CPEs react to multipath loss, reflections, and loss of
line-of-sight to the brodcast tower? How well does the technology
scale? Can it be used in a mesh configuration or is it
point-to-multipoint? They claim that their low-cost CPE can be deployed
without the need for an installer, which means it must be robust indeed.
This can be compared to Navini networks, which has developed a base station that uses phased antenna arrays (essentially smart antennas) to direct power at the CPEs, and simple CPEs that can be installed indoors.
Phased array antenna approaches allow for better penetration and even a notional non-line of sight capability, but they require a managed base station and can’t be used for organic mesh networks, like the meshes that are created as a part of Nokia Rooftop‘s or Sky Pilot‘s solutions.
Related posts:
Could this be used to connect to WiFi sites?
I think that’s the point – use hacked cards with proprietary protocols to do “long haul”, and then 802.11a/b/g within the hotspot area.
Dave,
We use a proprietary DSSS approach at the mac layer – we don’t do Freq hopping at all. We also don’t modify the PHY layer.
You got it correct above “we do long haul to the hotspot” we are a pipe or the “copper in the air”
hi i would like to know more about phased array antenna…how it works, what does it do..advantages and disadvantages from other types of antenna..its for my coursework in uni..if u could tell me where to find some info about this i would really aprreciate it..thanx for your help..