Subject: [NEXTEL-1] (unknown)

From: "marcel_rf1" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 05:31:44 -0000

WIRELESS

Broadband A Go-Go

In city after city, high-speed wireless access may be the next 
Internet revolution

By Steven M. Cherry

I've got a Dell laptop on my knees and the wind
is in my (very short) hair. I've got as many
windows open as a beach house in
summer-Google searches and instant
messages to my wife; in the background, a new
batch of e-mails downloads and my hometown
public radio station streams on. It's the usual
cruise down the information superhighway at 2
Mb/s.

Look, ma, no wires! Spectrum editor Steven
Cherry rides real and virtual superhighways
near Orlando, Fla. His laptop is logged into
a test network created by MeshNetworks to
demonstrate broadband data rates with full
mobility.

But I'm also hurtling down an actual superhighway-U.S. Interstate 4, 
at a very real 115 km/h. I'm in a Ford Mustang convertible,
under cotton-ball clouds and a postcard-blue Florida sky. The Dell is 
outfitted with a prototype card that communicates with a test network 
set up by broadband wireless start-up MeshNetworks Inc.

Earlier and a few miles away in Mesh's Maitland headquarters, outside 
Orlando, I had asked Rick Rotondo, whose business card calls him 
Mesh's "director of disruptive technologies," how fast we could go
and  still retain a broadband connection. After all, laptops using
the 
best-known wireless Internet technology, IEEE 802.11, will move
beyond  an access point and lose their connections at mere bicycle 
speeds. 

Rotondo had grinned impishly and asked, "How big a speeding ticket do
you want to pay?"

Even at speed-limit speeds, the Mesh network held up, with download 
data rates of at least 500 kb/s. That's faster, on the road and in
the  air, than Aerie Network Inc.'s Ricochet service, which blankets
Denver  with 128 kb/s coverage, maintaining connections at city-street
driving  speeds of about 45 km/h. Though slower than Mesh, Ricochet
is no  experiment-it made a highly publicized but failed attempt to
go national in 2000, and now lives on in the Mile High City with 
several thousand subscribers. One, the Denver Police Department, uses 
it to put squad cars on the department's internal network.

Mesh is the only company to have figured out how to dynamically hand 
devices off from one access point to another at broadband data rates 
and six-lane freeway velocities. But beyond that, Mesh, along with 
Ricochet and other wireless point-to-point networks, are the best
hope for a fully mobile future-a world where we can teleconference 
each other, watch news and entertainment in real time, order from 
online catalogs, pay our bills, and answer e-mail-anywhere, anytime, 
on ever smaller and sleeker handheld devices powered by ever more 
powerful microprocessors and software.

Such a world would be an enormous boon for some huge industries that 
haven't had much to cheer about over the past two years-computers, 
consumer electronics, semiconductors, entertainment, and information 
services, as well as, of course, the troubled telecommunications
sector. It could also heal the digital divide, especially in huge 
swaths of the rural and undeveloped world, where wired last-mile 
connections are few and far between. For many, any connection is
exciting; 2-Mb/s is positively thrilling.

What the new networks-Mesh, Ricochet, and others, such as the 
140-km-long one run by start-up BroadBand Solutions Co. (BBSC) in 
metropolitan Salt Lake City-have in common is that they're fast, 
wireless, and not 802.11 (Wi-Fi), the IEEE standard that, despite its 
short range and limited suitability for outdoor use, has taken the 
world by storm.

They're not meant to supplant Wi-Fi so much as to supplement it-in 
some cases, literally. For example, in the BBSC network, wireless 
hubs, akin to a cellphone system's base station, might feed a 
building's rooftop access point that is in turn connected to a Wi-Fi 
access point inside. The result: hot spots of 2-Mb/s wireless 
connectivity that suffuse public spaces, offices, and apartments. 
Likewise, Ricochet offers a customized version of Linksys' popular 
IEEE 802.11 router; with it, an entire household or small office can 
share a single Ricochet account.

On the road

So this past spring I took to the road. Pursued by a monster Rocky 
Mountain snowstorm, I saw how wireless networks were transforming 
cities and towns in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. I topped off my tour 
with a trip to Orlando, home of futuristic theme parks and 
MeshNetworks' bold vision of fully mobile broadband access.

My odyssey started by snaking through a starkly beautiful landscape
of mountains and prairies, cruising Interstate 80 toward Sandy, Utah, 
home of BroadBand Solutions.

Utah is an odd state. It's almost as large as the U.K., but because
of the way it was settled by the Mormons, roughly 75 percent of its 
two million people live on less than 1 percent of that land, a narrow
band defined by Interstate 15 from Ogden in the north to Provo in
the south. Only about 10 km wide, the corridor is an ideal market if 
your goal is to provide wireless broadband to as many people as 
possible as  cheaply as possible.

That's pretty much what BBSC has done. With six wireless hubs, four
of them attached to the wireline Internet by 45-Mb/s connections,
BBSC might have the largest single wireless network in the world. It
covers 1500 square kilometers and 1.5 million people. Its customers 
pay as  little as US $50 a month for bit rates of 1 Mb/s in each 
network direction.

BBSC's network piggybacks on other, failed, wireless businesses, as 
well as on older telecommunications ventures, such as a 60-meter-tall 
television transmitter tower south of the central city. Some of those 
earlier ventures failed because they didn't have BBSC's skill at
mounting and positioning just the right number of radios on a tower
to maximize data rates; without that know-how, multiple radios begin 
interfering with one another. BBSC's predecessors could have 
benefited, too, from the company's home-brewed network management and 
billing software, which can show customers how best to connect 
multiple offices through BBSC's network-and show BBSC where 
bottlenecks are developing and where best to allocate new
resources.

In an aerobic eight-hour tour in the company of three of BBSC's
bright young engineers-Trevor Paskett, 22; Josh Gottwald, 29; and 
Bryan  Scott, 27-I saw four of the company's six network hubs. The
complexity and diversity of BBSC's network is breathtaking, as was
our survey of  it, climbing up building staircases, steep rooftop
ladders, and hillside switchbacks overlooking the Wasatch valley.

First stop: a large office complex called Jordan Commons Tower [see 
photos], owned by local magnate Larry H. Miller, whose holdings 
include several auto dealerships and the Jazz, Utah's professional 
basketball team. The tower, a former high school, is a data
business's  dream site, with redundant power coming from generators
on 
two electric grids and multiple connections to the Internet's 
backbone.

BBSC uses several products to establish point-to-point wireless 
broadband connections throughout the 1500-km2 Salt Lake City metro 
area, and all were on display. They include Sunnyvale, Calif.-based 
Proxim Inc.'s Tsunami QuickBridge radios that send data 5 km at 60
Mb/s (or 10 km at 20 Mb/s), and Canopy radios from Motorola Inc. 
(Schaumburg, Ill.), 16 km at 3 Mb/s. [See photo] The hub radios feed 
one another and more than 40 cell sites unconnected to the wired 
Internet. These smaller cells use Cisco's Aironet 350 radios, rated 
for 1 Mb/s to 11 Mb/s at distances of 240 to 600 meters.

The Tsunami and Canopy radios operate in the 5.7-5.8-GHz frequency, 
while IEEE 802.11b-compliant Aironet uses 2.4 GHz-all of which are 
unlicensed regions of spectrum, a matter of some concern. "A 
consultant told us that we ought to switch some of the hubs to
licensed frequencies," Gottwald told me, as he unscrewed a
custom-made  gunmetal case crammed with routers, servers, and backup 
power supply.
 
"We can already see how crowded 2.4 has become. We're ahead of the 
game because Canopy uses 5 GHz, but the same thing could happen 
there." Unlicensed frequencies become cluttered with everything from 
cordless phones to microwave ovens, as many home users of Wi-Fi have 
learned the hard way.

The company's 1400 customers are local businesses, apartment 
buildings, and other, smaller, Internet service providers, such as 
Lyman Brothers Inc. (Salt Lake City), which connects networks in 
southern Africa via satellite to the Internet through several Utah 
providers, the largest of which is BBSC. Strange but true: if you are 
an Internet customer in, say, Madagascar or Tanzania, even "local" 
e-mail may be going through Salt Lake City.

We piled back into the BBSC van to visit one of the system's key
hubs, dubbed South Mountain, halfway between Sandy and Provo. It 
turned out  to be an ordinary two-story office building. Getting to 
the 4-meter  rooftop tower involved walking through an office to a 
closet in a  corner of the building, scaling a vertical industrial 
ladder located  there, and then pushing through a roof hatch. 
Maintaining a wireless network isn't a desk job.

Utah's wireless corner of the Internet, with its welter of 
connections, businesses, and technologies, also requires a good head 
for network topology and architecture. Hubs back one another up, as
do the plethora of different ISPs. Ultimately, BBSC relies on two 
Internet backbone providers, the Electric Lightwave Inc. subsidiary
of Citizens Communications (Stamford, Conn.), which has a direct 
gigabit  fiber connection to the backbone, and Global Crossing 
(Bermuda).

I could have spent a week with BBSC, but it was time to move on. 
Retracing my steps onto I-80, I stopped for the night at Evanston, 
Wyo., just short of the Continental Divide. Snow had begun to
fall, and more was expected. Lots more.

Home on the range

I woke to find a thick crust of ice on the car, but after an hour of 
diminished-visibility driving, I outran the storm. I arrived in 
Laramie just in time to have lunch with Brett Glass, a geeky
40-something computer consultant and technology writer who heads 
Lariat.org, a nonprofit that runs the state of Wyoming's only 
indigenous Internet service provider.

Lariat traces itself back to a computer users' group that decided, in 
the early 1990s, to take into its own hands the problem of good 
Internet access in a city of only 25 000 residents. After setting
up a bank of dial-up modems, Glass and his friends considered the 
needs of Laramie's small businesses.

At the time, a standard U.S. Internet connection cost $3500 a month, 
buying a data rate of about 1.5 Mb/s. Lariat found it could buy
radios and provide 2-Mb/s connectivity for a one-time fee of $3500
and 
monthly charges of $600 (nowadays, only $125 for setup and $125 per 
month). Thus in 1994, when most people were first hearing of the Web 
and PC modems were just breaking the 28-kb/s barrier, Lariat was 
offering wireless Internet access at data rates that are still 
unavailable to many people today.

Though able to offer the same data rates as BBSC, Lariat has several 
problems unique to the city of Laramie. Foremost are zoning 
regulations that prohibit construction of new antennas. Nor can
Lariat piggyback on existing antennas owned by cellular providers, 
such as Sprint and Qwest, because broadband Internet is a potential 
competitor to those companies' nascent 3G mobile data services. 
Without a tall antenna able to cover the entire city, Lariat offers
no residential broadband wireless access.

Lariat's second problem involves its connection to the Internet 
backbone. No regional Internet service provider in Wyoming offers the 
high data rates BBSC can get in Utah to pass packets in bulk along to 
their Internet destinations-"backhauling," as it's called. The 
backhaul bottleneck prevents Lariat from offering more or bigger 
Internet connections. "We could take on a 45-Mb/s account right now, 
but we don't have the bandwidth," Glass complained, his mood matching 
the now darkening sky.

In 1998, the local gas utility in Laramie tried to bring a different 
wireless provider into town.

Ricochet, then owned by Metricom Inc., scattered its reasonably 
high-speed data receivers and transmitters on streetlights and the 
sides of buildings in urban areas. Laptops and PDAs
equipped with a proprietary card would be able to get online anywhere 
in the city. However, Ricochet used the same unlicensed 900-MHz 
frequency as Lariat's network; fearing radio interference, Lariat 
mounted a successful campaign against Ricochet.

Metricom went on to establish itself in 22 cities across the United 
States before filing a spectacular billion-dollar bankruptcy in 2001 
[see "What Went Wrong at Ricochet," IEEE Spectrum, March 2002, pp. 
60-61]. The service was sold to Aerie Networks, which has patiently
resurrected Ricochet in two cities, San Diego and its hometown of 
Denver, not coincidentally the final stop on my road trip. Glass 
warned me about worse weather to come, and I was off.

Airy rebirth

The next day, my blizzard-Denver's worst in 90 years-finally caught
up with me, dumping what would eventually total 80 cm of snow
downtown 
and an absurd 225 cm in outlying mountainside towns. Just before it 
shut down the city, I met with Ricochet's most interesting customer,
Lieutenant John Pettinger of the Denver Police Department.

Until Ricochet, the only connection between cops on the beat and the 
Internet was cellular digital packet data (CDPD), a nominally 
19.2-kb/s data service that's usually much slower in practice.
Infact, the service is so slow that it's used only for short queries 
to the FBI or other law nforcement agencies to make sure that someone
stopped for, say, speeding isn't wanted for murder elsewhere.

Though Ricochet's throughput never exceeds 180 kb/s, Pettinger's
field tests showed that it's never less than 128 kb/s. That turns out 
to be fast enough for police officers to log into headquarters
through 
a secure virtual private network. "Cops in the field can look at
digital  photos of suspects, they can query our database to find 
someone with a unique tattoo, or by height and weight and 
age-basically, they can use all the applications they normally do
when 
sitting in the office," Pettinger told me. With a few taps of his 
Compaq Tablet PC's  stylus, he was showing me the grizzled mugs of 
Denver's most wanted.

Police departments all over the United States use CDPD, but, being 
based on the analog cellular services of the 1980s, it's poised for 
the scrap heap: AT&T Wireless (Redmond, Wash.), its main provider, 
plans to pull the plug on it in June 2004. So these days Pettinger 
spends a lot of time telling other cops about Ricochet.

With the Denver airport closed, I sat in a downtown hotel room that I 
was lucky to have and pondered the demise of CDPD. Aerie CEO Mort 
Aaronson may have a winning formula for Ricochet: police departments 
get a network three or four times faster than Sprint's PCS at lower
cost; Aaronson gets municipal rights-of-way for his streetlight 
pole-mounted access points.

Peer-to-peer broadband

Ricochet in Denver and Mesh in Orlando have several things in common, 
though snow obviously isn't one of them. Both hang access points off 
streetlights. Both maintain a network connection while in motion. And 
both think emergency and other municipal services-police, fire, 
traffic, and so on-are going to provide critical toeholds for their 
technology and products. But MeshNetworks' vision is more futuristic. 
What makes it different is the mesh.

In any wireless network, devices communicate with access points,
which  are connected to one another and the wired Internet. But in a 
mesh  network, devices are also transponders, or proto-access 
points-they  don't just exchange data with access points, but with
one 
another as well. A given laptop or PDA's ability to connect to the 
Internet isn't  limited to the access points it can directly reach, 
since intermediate  users can push its packets out to the
proto-access 
points.

One benefit of this is that individual access points are less likely 
to become overcrowded. For another, devices can reduce the amount of 
power they need; since every other user is, in effect, an access 
point, the likelihood that there's one nearby is dramatically 
increased. Imagine that every other cellphone user you see is also a 
miniature cellular tower.

How do the devices in a mesh network find out about one another and 
know who is intermediate to an actual access point? The network 
maintains a dynamic routing table that updates itself in
milliseconds. While other networks, such as Ricochet's, use 
sophisticated routing tables to balance network traffic and transfer 
mobile users from one access point to another, none attempts
Mesh's Herculean task of tracking proto-access points, also moving 
around at highway speed.

According to Rotondo, the disruptive technologist, the meshiness of 
Mesh's technology makes it ideally suited to police, fire, and other 
emergency services, and municipal applications in general.
For example, the company has begun to make "bread crumb" devices, 
repeaters the size of a cellphone that can be left behind if, for 
example, firefighters have to comb through the wreckage of
a burning building. They will never go farther than the network can 
reach, because as the radio signals weaken, they can leave behind 
another bread crumb.

The company also envisions these bread crumb-like repeaters built
into 
traffic signals, parking meters, and just about anything else a 
municipality might want to put on its network. Once the
mesh is built, it can be used by anyone. More access points and 
Internet backhauling can be added as needed.

While no other company has put together Mesh's combination of 2-Mb/s 
data rates, fully mobile wirelessness, and mesh networking, new 
developments to improve wireless last-mile connections
abound. To name just a few, Vivato Inc. (San Francisco) recently 
released a Wi-Fi switch that extends the range of IEEE 802.11 from 
dozens of meters to kilometers by transmitting packets in
a beam, rather than in all directions at once. ArrayComm Inc.'s (San 
Jose, Calif.) 3G cellular base stations similarly locate wireless 
broadcasting devices and aim their signals directly at them,
improving data rates.

Meanwhile, a new extension to IEEE 802.16, a standard for wireless 
metropolitan-area networking, adds mobility to a specification that 
might enhance, or even replace, 802.11. And so-called 
fourth-generation cellular technologies, such as those of Flarion 
Technologies Inc. (Bedminster, N.J.) and Soma Networks Inc. (San 
Francisco), would combine the broad coverage of cellular with 
broadband data rates.

Which technologies, and which companies, will control the last mile
is still unknown. But just as many first-time telephone customers 
bypassed wireline and went straight to cellular in places like
Hungary, Brazil, and China, for many individuals and businesses
around the world, the broadband Internet will be wireless.

To Probe Further

Lariat.org's 1998 dispute with Ricochet over radio interference is 
documented at
http://www.lariat.org/lariatnews.html.

MeshNetworks' proprietary peer-to-peer routing is described at
http://www.meshnetworks.com/pages/technology/qdma_vs_80211.htm

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jun03/bb.html

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