Friday, December 5, 2008

Wireless Optical Mesh Solution Networks

ClearMesh Networks Wednesday launched a wireless optical mesh solution designed to fill the gap between copper, RF and fiber in delivering 5mbps to 100mbps services to small and midsized businesses.

“There isn’t a cost-effective way for carriers today to extend fiber to SMBs,” said Fima Vaisman, ClearMesh’s senior vice president of marketing, explaining their monthly spend of $500 to $1,000 does not support a fiber trench where it is not already available. “What we provide is a solution that extends the fiber core without having to trench fiber.”

It also provides higher bandwidth than do copper and RF solutions, such as Wi-Fi and WiMAX, he said. “If a customer needs more bandwidth and they are looking for an SLA, we think there is a gap between those solutions provided at the entry level by WiMAX and Wi-Fi, and the high-end level by fiber. There is a gap in the middle. That is the gap we are trying to serve.”

Available immediately, the ClearMesh Metro Grid solution includes the ClearMesh 300 node, which can be mounted on a pole or rooftop, and the ClearMesh Management System, which provides tools for installation, diagnostics, service analysis and provisioning. The ClearMesh 300 node combines wireless and optical technologies with a Layer 2 mesh architecture to deliver business-grade Ethernet.

“The ClearMesh 300 Node is a switching platform,” explained Vaisman. “It has an Ethernet switch with 2-gigabit Ethernet capacity. Four of the Ethernet ports are copper and they are connected to optical transceivers.”

The optical transceivers, he said, are LED-based, which gives them a wider beam than systems using lasers, like free-space optics. “What that allows the product to do is be installed on a light pole as well as on top of a building,” said Vaisman. “A laser product cannot be installed on a light pole because the light pole has too much vibration, too much movement. The product wouldn’t stay locked on. With the product we have the light beams are locked on and stay locked on using automatic tracking whether on a light pole or building. With that you have a much broader ability to deploy a mesh in a metro area. If the device moves, the light cone still hits the other node.”

Each node has three optical transceivers, which operate on the license-free 850nm light band and reach 250 meters. Each transceiver is motorized, so it can move independently up and down, and 360 degrees around. “This allows each node to see three other nodes. Using that, we create a mesh,” said Vaisman, explaining the mesh requires one node to be fiber-feed, and several nodes can be fed from the same fiber to increase the capacity delivered into the mesh.

The ClearMesh node lists for $6,000, and less in volume. Considering installation costs, the company uses $5,000 per node in its ROI calculations. In contrast to trenching fiber, ClearMesh can cover seven buldings in a MetroGrid network for $35,000 in a matter of days while the fiber deployment over the same area will cost $180,000 and take months to install, he said. With a single customer per building and a single T1 replacement at $500 per month, the payback is 10 months, Vaisman said, adding a more realistic scenario is three customers per building paying $750 per month for a 10mbps service for an ROI of two months.

Yankee Group Analyst Tara Howard agrees that the ClearMesh solution serves “as a logical extension of a fiber network,” but she questions the market potential, discounting its appeal to Tier 1 companies that are laying fiber. “The opportunity is going to be with local LECs and municipalities,” she said, adding the fact that it does not compete with Wi-Fi or WiMAX is a plus.

“We don’t do what Wi-Fi does; we don’t offer mobility,” said Vaisman. “We don’t do what WiMAX does; we don’t offer five-mile reach. In a dense metro area, we offer high bandwidth and the ability to sign SLAs without any interference,” he said. The systems offers latency at one-tenth of 1ms, so 10 nodes equals 1ms of delay.

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