RedMoon chooses BelAir gear for Texas mesh deployment
BelAir Networks this week announced that RedMoon will use BelAir equipment to build a wireless broadband mesh network throughout the Town of Addison, Texas, which plans to use the network for town functions like public safety, as well as community access.
RedMoon CEO Bryan Thompson said the 170 nodes of BelAir gear will replace single-radio Tropos equipment that was installed two years ago. While the Tropos gear supported community access for some time, that network was not reliable and robust enough to meet the demands of Addison town personnel for public safety and public works, he said.
“Early on, [the Tropos network] was working fairly well, which proved out the model that people will subscribe to this from a [community-access] revenue standpoint,” Thompson said. “Of course, we had other applications that we were counting on delivering, including the public-safety piece, but we couldn’t prove that out with that gear, although it was being supported by the manufacturer.”
Upon realizing this, RedMoon began searching for alternatives and was attracted to BelAir Networks, which offers service-level agreements (SLAs) with its equipment.
“We looked at it more from a carrier perspective—it’s got the 9s that carriers typically look at, and it’s got that quality to it that lets us feel comfortable delivering applications, including voice,” Thompson said. “Also, they were the first ones to step up to the table and said they would basically guarantee it.”
Jim Freeze, BelAir Networks’ senior vice president of marketing and alliances, said this sentiment is becoming more commonplace throughout the market.
“It’s consistent with what we’re continuing to see,” Freeze said during an interview with MRT. “When broadband and the applications really matters, we’re increasingly seeing customers and service providers coming to BelAir.”
In Addison, RedMoon will deploy 170 nodes of BelAir100 and BelAir200 gear throughout the 4.5-square-mile town to provide average public access data rates of more than 1 MB/s, Thompson said. Expected to be completed by the end of the year, the mesh network will utilize 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum and work in conjunction with an automated meter reading network—operated by RedMoon with another vendor—that operates on low-band licensed spectrum, he said.
Video surveillance and public-safety data are among the key town functions to be supported by the mesh network. To date the town has not paid for the network—the original network was a proof-of-concept deployment—but the town has “agreed to contribute financially once we confirm” the new network can support the town functions reliably, Thompson said.
