Out, Damned Hot Spots!

When it comes to Wi-Fi wireless LANs, people love to talk about hot spots, probably because the phrase seems so, um, spot-on. As they're deployed now, Wi-Fi access points typically fire up only small areas: coffee shops, city parks, office conference rooms. Wi-Fi makes these places brim with megabits of bandwidth, albeit bandwidth that's only available as long as you stay put.

But San Francisco-based start-up Vivato has developed a technology that it hopes will make such isolated hot spots obsolete. Dubbed PacketSteering, the technology combines gigabit Ethernet switching with Wi-Fi and a smart antenna design to extend the range of a single Wi-Fi access point up to two-and-a-half miles.

Phil Belanger, Vivato's vice president of marketing, said PacketSteering relies on a phased antenna array that is fed different levels of power and phases, resulting in oblong “beams” of Wi-Fi that can be directed over long distances. When an end user wants broadband access, Wi-Fi beams are created on a packet-by-packet basis in a matter of microseconds and shot out to the user.

“The smart antenna stuff has been done before,” Belanger said. “The unique thing is combining it with Wi-Fi.”

Rajeev Chand, senior equity research analyst with Rutberg & Co., said the single-access approach to Wi-Fi is promising. “This business model… reduces configuration and maintenance costs, it reduces the installation costs and it eases deployment,” he said.

Vivato initially is targeting large enterprises that occupy multiple floors of a building or campus environment. Inside a building, a single Vivato access point can cover an entire floor. If set up outside a building, the access point can cover multiple floors, though dead spots will occur if enough concrete, glass or steel blocks the transmission path.

Vivato primarily will use a partner sales channel, but the company also plans to sell directly to some large service providers. Pricing has not been set because Vivato is still waiting for feedback from companies testing the technology in the field, Belanger said.

According to Chand, pricing and performance are the two major challenges facing Vivato's business model. “Obviously, we'll need to see some performance numbers that are encouraging,” he said. “And access point prices are pretty low right now, so what is the pricing for the solution relative to traditional access points?”

Belanger, however, envisions Vivato's solution changing the economics of Wi-Fi even further, especially in the public access arena. Because the technology can cover so much geography, multiple properties can be lit up with just a few access points, giving operators a better return on investment.

“Now the operators of those networks can leverage their contracts to provide coverage to another area,” Belanger said. “It's going to change people's perception of how Wi-Fi works.”