Motorola expands municipal mesh strategy

Jul 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Donny Jackson

Motorola announced the last of three new offerings in its municipal mesh-networking portfolio as the vendor giant continues its efforts to make products in the sector more accessible to a broader base of potential customers, including cable companies.

At the core of the new product line is the HotZone Duo, a low-cost, standards-based 802.11 solution featuring radios operating in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz bands, power-over-Ethernet capability, 802.11e-level quality of service and hop-to-hop encryption.

The latest variant of the HotZone Duo is called Cable Mesh. The solution lets cable operators leverage their existing broadband infrastructures to deploy citywide Wi-Fi access networks, said Rick Rotondo, director of marketing for Motorola's mesh-networks product group.

“It's basically the same technology, only it has a built-in hybrid fiber-coax modem in it, so it can be mounted right to the cable infrastructure … and it will get its power and data interface directly from the cable,” he said.

Rotondo said he believes cable companies are well positioned to flourish in the wireless broadband market — a noticeable gap in cable firms' bundled offerings.

“There are three things you need to make a mesh network work, if you are an owner: first, you need to provide backhaul; second, you need to be able to provide power; the third thing you need is something to mount these devices on,” Rotondo said. “Cable companies have all that stuff in spades.”

For operators using HotZone Duo, Motorola also announced MeshPlanner, a software solution that lets network designers plan and optimize a HotZone Duo network. In addition to simply determining ideal node locations for a given coverage area, MeshPlanner lets the operator input available assets to ensure real-world applicability, Rotondo said.

“If you can mount on certain poles or buildings, you can tell it that. If you have backhaul in certain areas, you can tell it that. It takes all these parameters and builds them into the model,” he said. “So it doesn't just randomly put down mesh nodes to give you the best coverage. It saves a ton a time, because … in a mesh system, knowing which pole you can mount on makes a big difference.”