Vivato introduces Wi-Fi switch

A new Wi-Fi infrastructure company, Vivato, is taking the first steps toward blending fixed and mobile wireless via a new LAN architecture that combines gigabit Ethernet switching, Wi-Fi and smart antenna designs.

Vivato’s switches are planar phased array antennas built into a flat panel that will support standard IEEE 802.11b, 11a and 11g client adapters, the company said.

“What we’re doing allows Wi-Fi to scale in terms of speed, capacity, [and] coverage distance. This allows it to take advantage of the fact that Wi-Fi clients are going to be dirt cheap and devices everywhere. It also dramatically affects the cost of deploying broadband,” said Ken Biba, Vivato’s chairman and CEO.

The antennas are the architectural foundation, allowing Vivato’s switches to deliver almost 800 Mbps of capacity in optimal form, Biba said. First-generation products peak out at 54 M/ps.

“Those shaped antenna beams are high-gain frequency receive antennas. At very low power, but very high effective gain, we can talk to backward-compatible existing Wi-Fi clients over very long distances--outdoors up to 7 kilometers, indoor coverage as far as 2 kilometers at full data rates,” Biba said.

Data rates range from 11 Mbps, under 802.11b standards to 54 Mbps in 802.11a.

“Both in space and in frequency we can talk to multiple clients at these high data rates at the same time. If you do that, you get a big coverage area,” Biba said. “A footprint off one of our switches is measured with a kilometer radius as opposed to a few 10s of meters for standard Wi-Fi.”

The technology, which will be fully available in the first quarter, targets enterprises “because that’s where the money is,” said Biba. “Very few businesses really outsource their local area networks, they build them and manage them. We just follow along that our customers want to be those internal IT departments that manage their own networks.”

Farther out, Biba projected the technology could jumpstart public LANs.

“We provide a tool for people to take this hotspot market and turn it into a hot zone business,” he said. “There’s been only intermittent success in that wireless first mile space, fixed wireless. Here you have a product that takes advantage of the low cost of Wi-Fi, but begins to have a better value proposition than conventional fixed wireless.