Firetide eyes multi-mesh management

Firetide, one of several mesh wireless networking vendors eyeing better prospects ahead in the increasingly active market for municipal networks, announced a new software suite allowing service providers to better manage large-scale networks consisting of multiple mesh topologies. The company's HotView Pro Mesh Management Software is actually targeted at both service providers and large enterprises, and offers mesh scalability up to 1000 nodes along with the ability to deploy and manage multiple mesh environments.

"We see mesh networks maturing, and service providers are beginning to be more knowledgeable about the applications they want to support and how the want to manage them," said Barbara Cardillo, vice president of marketing at Firetide. HotView Pro will be broadly commercially available at the end of October. Although it can't manage other vendor mesh access points, the suite does have a tunneling feature that allows such multi-vendor multi-mesh topologies to co-exist. Firetide also announced European Wi-Fi operator The Cloud, Europe's leading Wi-Fi network, and the City of Rio Rancho, New Mexico as beta customers. In addition, it announced a 4.9 Ghz version of its HotPort mesh platform for the public safety agencies using that frequency band.

"The Cloud is migrating from HotSpots in shops and cafes to HotZones covering larger geographic areas and offering expanded services such as CCTV and Skype," said George Polk, CEO of The Cloud. "The refurbishment of the town of Bridgend is the first in this expansion effort and Firetide's ability to scale and manage multiple meshes is central to this effort." The Cloud's infrastructure is a multi-service provider platform for ISPs, mobile operators and cable TV companies.

Azulstar Networks is including HotView Pro in its 103 square mile deployment of Wi-Fi and VoIP services in City of Rio Rancho, NM. The Rio Rancho deployment is also a beta customer for the HotPort 4.9 GHz solution.

HotView Pro software provides live monitoring and management, and the MeshBridge feature allows interoperability between two or more mesh networks operating on different channels or frequencies. MeshBridge connects multiple mesh networks to form a single mesh environment allowing the network to scale to any distance. Other enhancements include traffic prioritization and multiple simultaneous paths for load balancing and instant route recovery.