Wavion releases first MIMO products

Wavion today took the wraps off of its first metro Wi-Fi access points, which use spatially adaptive transmission techniques and multiple antennas to increase range, coverage and capacity in municipal wireless networks.

Wavion made its debut at Globalcomm earlier this summer, announcing its new non-line-of-site, multiple input/multiple output Wi-Fi technology, but today it is announcing its first commercial product and its first trial customer, CONXX Reveal, which has built and is operating Maryland's Allegany County network.

The new access point is called the WS450, and Wavion officials claim it can quadruple the coverage of existing access points in metro Wi-Fi deployments, a huge advantage in many metro areas that don't have the density of an urban downtown. CONXX engineers have conducted tests of the gear, and produced trial results of double the range of other access points while maintaining data rates of 10 Mb/s to 15 Mb/s.

Wavion's access point architecture uses six antennas and adaptive beam-forming technology to focus transmissions on individual users instead of radiating omni-directionally at all times, Wavion founder and Chief Technology Officer Mati Wax said in an earlier interview. While the system uses MIMO technology on the transmitting end, it connects with normal Wi-Fi receiving radios, requiring no equipment upgrade from the consumer. But the beam forming allows a service provider to extend the range of the access point more than double the average access point distance, resulting in only four access points to cover a city square mile as opposed to 25 for a normal metro Wi-Fi deployment, Wax said.

Wavion also adds space division multiple-access technology to the mix, allowing it to send four packets over the same frequency simultaneously, effectively quadrupling the overall capacity of the access point from 54 Mb/s to 216 Mb/s though each individual Wi-Fi receiver would receive a maximum speed of 54 Mb/s.