The Future of Wi-Fi is One Big Mesh

Broadband began in Cerritos, and now it's coming back. The name of this southern California community of 51,000 people that sits about 25 miles southeast of Los Angeles might ring a bell because it was close to Ground Zero for the region's devastating wildfires last fall. But for telecom types, it possesses a different kind of notoriety: In the early 1990s, Cerritos, Calif., was the testbed for GTE's groundbreaking fiber-to-the-home trial, one of the first field deployments of any type of broadband technology.

As a new year dawns, Cerritos is a city under the telecom industry microscope once again. This time Aiirnet Wireless, a wireless ISP, is making Cerritos the world's largest commercial Wi-Fi hot zone. Using new mesh network technology that drastically improves the business case and the technical feasibility for building large-scale Wi-Fi networks, Aiirnet has created an area of continuous coverage spanning 8.6 square miles and potentially providing Wi-Fi access to every municipal building, business and private residence in the city (though Wi-Fi is not initially being extended inside individual homes).

Not much resulted from Cerritos' original experience with broadband. Even though fiber-to-the-home is again a much-discussed technology seemingly on the verge of broad commercial deployment a decade later, the GTE trial was considered a failed experiment by many people in the industry — a broadband solution that was too expensive and too far ahead of its time.

That isn't likely to happen with Wi-Fi, which has been booming the last few years and shows few signs of abating. Wi-Fi is not exactly the experimental technology fiber-to-the-home was in the early 1990s. There are believed to be about 10,000 commercial Wi-Fi hot spots in the U.S., and many additional freenets and hot spots deployed in consumers' homes. There could be 50,000 or more hot spots in the U.S. by 2006, and Pyramid Research has estimated that there could be 707 million Wi-Fi users worldwide by 2008.

Still, Wi-Fi has long been viewed as just a small-footprint solution, with single access point deployments comprising the majority of public hot spots. Creating contiguous coverage for public areas such as shopping districts, neighborhoods and whole communities was once thought to be too complex and expensive an undertaking due to the absence of routing intelligence in early-generation access points, and the amount of wired backhaul that would be needed. This fact was one of the things that helped the mobile industry compartmentalize Wi-Fi as a complementary technology rather than view it as potentially competitive.

However, Aiirnet and an increasing number of wireless ISPs — a scrappy lot reminiscent of a past generation of CLECs — are challenging the pre-conceived notions about the limits of Wi-Fi.

“This is the evolution of public Wi-Fi,” said Stan Hirschman, CEO of Aiirnet, based in Woodland Hills, Calif. “I've read that if you took all the individual hot spots worldwide, they'd cover only a two-square-mile area. We're talking about 8.6 square miles. We're talking about 50,000 people.”

Though other community Wi-Fi hot zones are rapidly popping up all over the world, the Cerritos project's status as the largest so far makes it worth watching, according to others involved in the deployment as well as industry watchers.

“Cerritos will be almost like a cookie cutter for other communities to follow,” said Jasbir Singh, founder and chief technology officer at Pronto Networks, which is providing back office systems for Aiirnet's Cerritos deployment. The scalability of the network and the systems that support it, as well as the evolution of new features and services, will display the technology's feasibility and potential economic models, he said.

In the Cerritos deployment, Aiirnet's first and primary paying customer is the City of Cerritos, which has Wi-Fi covering several government buildings. But the municipal body also will help Aiirnet promote its service to other users.

John Yunker, Wi-Fi analyst at Pyramid Research, said that while the future of Wi-Fi pricing remains uncertain, the intelligence and thriftiness of mesh architectures represents a significant maturation for Wi-Fi.

Aiirnet's Cerritos hot zone is based on 802.11 mesh technology provided by Tropos Networks, of San Mateo, Calif. Tropos is perhaps the best-known among a growing cadre of Wi-Fi mesh technology vendors driven by the high cost of wireline backhaul and the lack of management intelligence in early-generation Wi-Fi configurations to develop self-organizing wireless LAN architectures that rely only on wireless backhaul within the network.

Aiirnet believes Tropos' mesh architecture, in which the access points seek out and link themselves to other access points to build the mesh, can scale well beyond the 8.6-square-mile topology in Cerritos. Aiirnet has advertised potential coverage up to 30 square miles, but “we think it could go up to 40 or 50 square miles,” said John Greibling, chief technology officer at Aiirnet.

As the former top-ranking technology executive at Metricomm and the network architect behind that company's Ricochet radio data service, Greibling has as much or more experience than anyone in the industry when it comes to building out community wireless coverage. He sees mesh technology as the next step beyond the large footprint but slower data rate of Metricomm.

“With mesh, there are no external antennas,” he said. “The network will evolve to use point-to-multipoint capability to inject more capacity into the mesh where it's needed.”

The Tropos Sphere NOS architecture also has a lightweight control protocol and Predictive Path Optimization technology that allows the mesh access points to reroute traffic to avoid disruptions.

“The advantage is not only in scaling the network, the auto-discovery, but in the intelligence of the network,” said Bert Williams, vice president of marketing at Tropos Networks.

These benefits allow Aiirnet to reduce the number of truck rolls that might otherwise be required to upgrade service or conduct network maintenance. Those truck rolls are the largest expense carriers have in supporting their services.

“Interference is a given in license-exempt bands, and mesh helps because it mitigates the effects of interference through self-organized re-routing,” Greibling said.

He added that Aiirnet has no qualms about operating its network at unlicensed frequencies because of the mesh's capability for reliable service. Still, he ultimately sees Aiirnet and other ISPs deploying mesh architectures at all kinds of frequencies, and not just using the Wi-Fi standard.

“We have a lot of experience in license-exempt bands,” Greibling said. We're in those exclusively now, but that may not always be the case. We eventually want to see vendors evolve to multi-layer meshes at different frequencies for different layers.”

While community Wi-Fi coverage may be the future of public Wi-Fi, as Aiirnet's Hirschman and Pronto's Singh suggested, mesh technology also may hold the key to the future of Wi-Fi deployment even in smaller footprints. In addition to Tropos, vendors such as Nortel Networks, Firetide, BelAir Networks, Mesh Networks and Strix Systems have developed mesh products to work in a variety of smaller configurations, from single-building installations to university campuses. Even in a smaller footprint, the backhaul savings and ease of auto-configurable network expansion provide benefits over traditional Wi-Fi access point systems.

“There are still a lot of single access point hot spots out there, but these hot spots are not going to expand easily if they are tied to wiring,” said Ike Nassi, chairman and co-founder of Firetide. “A mesh isn't difficult to understand — the Internet is basically a wired mesh. In appearance, a Wi-Fi mesh works just like a Layer 2 switch.”

While some mesh vendors see evolving corporate enterprise networks and small hot zones as the initial proving ground for mesh architectures, Aiirnet has been quick to extrapolate the concept.

“The community for wireless broadband is somewhere that 50% of the community has no DSL or cable modem capability,” Hirschman said. “That's the case in Cerritos.” Hirschman said remote suburbs and rural communities may offer the best opportunities for Aiirnet to deploy elsewhere. The ISP has been developing a working relationship with the Rural Broadband Coalition and with utilities that serve rural communities, and whose infrastructure Aiirnet can leverage to deploy its own. (In Cerritos, Aiirnet access points are deployed on property owned by the City of Cerritos.)

Hirschman added, “Unlike the early days of DSL, there's no room for mistakes here. The promise of Wi-Fi has been a long time coming, and we need to provide a seamless and reliable service that won't make them think of DSL.”

It's an ambitious goal for a company that's less than one year old. Several employees besides Greibling came to Aiirnet after working at Metricomm, where they believed the Ricochet service had viability despite the company's financial troubles (Metricomm was bankrupt for about two years before it was acquired by Aerie in November 2001.) Aiirnet evaluated Wi-Fi mesh technology in trial deployments that took place in rural and suburban towns in Texas and Wyoming before deciding to deploy it commercially.

“What we're doing with Aiirnet's service is like Ricochet in some ways,” Greibling said. “We believe the wireless community broadband access architecture is viable.”

In deciding where to deploy its network next, Aiirnet undertakes a multi-phase market assessment. First, the company scores the community for profitability and potential timing for return on its investment. “We think we can predict what the take rate will be,” Hirschman said.

Then, Aiirnet evaluates deployment locations with its vendor and other partners. During the contractual phase, it obtains approval to use utility or municipal rights-of-way for deployment before it finally implements the network.

Besides working with a community's municipal government to promote and sell service to local users, Aiirnet also brings in a slew of roaming partners that will encourage usage of the network by visitors passing through town. The company already has forged roaming agreements with Boingo Wireless, iPass and GRIC.

However, the ability to secure municipal government agencies as both partners and customers ultimately may be the key to long-term success for Aiirnet. The public safety agencies and other departments serving these communities, such as public works, likely will be the most frequent users of hot zone coverage.

That promise of usage is something that operators of individual Wi-Fi hot spots, with their transient customer bases, never can ensure.

“What we're doing is bringing value to these communities,” Hirschman said. “Once they have they coverage, we don't think they'll switch.”