How cities go wireless

I'm Bob Artner from TechRepublic, and if you're lucky coming to a city near you is a new way to go wireless. It uses the technology we've talked about here before. It's called mesh networks.

Since it's tennis season and I'm going to use my tennis racket to illustrate how mesh networks are different than regular networks. If you can see all the strings in this racket imagine that each one of the intersections of these was a small powered station to provide wireless service. Here's what I mean. Imagine a city, and if you're providing regular wireless service, what you do is you build towers in different locations and maybe you connect them into a central location and then anybody who wants to use service, if they're here or if they're, you know, here, here, each place uses the same bandwidth available to this tower, so as more people are in this area the bandwidth available for each of them declines.

Now let's take this tennis racket and assume that this is a mesh network providing service to a municipality and I'm only going to do this for a small portion, but let's use this as a grid to provide a series of very small powered wireless stations on a mesh network and I'll do about 12 or 15 of these just so I can illustrate the point. Okay, now as you can see, imagine that I've done this for the entire city. Each one of these only provides service for a very small area. What are the advantages is, if one of these goes down, just eliminates, there's still enough redundancy in the system to continue providing service and, since each area is so small there aren't as many bandwidth congestion problems because people are going to be moving in and out of those individual ranges very quickly.

So what are the advantages that a mesh network offers a city if it's trying to go wireless? Well, there are three main ones. First of all, cost. This thing is kind of intuitive because you have many more towers to build, but each one of these stations is much less expensive than building these big cellular towers.

What's another advantage? Reliability, because we mentioned there is so much redundancy built into the system that they could be much more reliable than traditional wireless.

And third, cities are in a unique position to install these because they already have the rights of way. In other words, they've installed streetlights, they've installed light poles, they've put up traffic signs all over the place, and you could use those to actually be the bases for putting these stations up. So a city is in a unique position to use its own right of way to provide wireless access.

So that's the technology behind using mesh networks for city wireless. Now, the politics behind it are a different story altogether and we'll talk about that some other time.