The untethered working environment holds the promise of freeing employees from their desktop computers and allowing them to work where they can be most efficient while still maintaining a connection to a company’s network.
The walls blocking that potential today include lack of capacity compared with wired Ethernet connections-which usually provide between 10 Megabits per second and 100 Mbps of bandwidth-and the high cost of implementing an officewide or home system.
Radiata Communications Pty. Ltd., founded in Australia in 1997 by two former professors at Macquarie University, thinks it has found a way around those walls using a standards-based wireless technology.
Using the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.11a standard to power its wireless engine, Radiata says it can provide wireless connection bandwidth of up to 54 Mbps in an office environment with costs comparable to much slower wireless connections.
While IEEE 802.11a does not roll off the tongue as easily as Bluetooth, Radiata is banking that the higher bandwidth compared with Bluetooth’s 2 Mbps bandwidth, or even IEEE 802.11b’s 11 Mbps bandwidth, will help equipment vendors with the pronunciation.
“Cost and performance are the two main obstacles that have been holding back the broad adoption of wireless networks,” said Chris Beare, chairman and chief executive officer of Radiata. “Radiata’s vast experience in the wireless industry, from baseband to RF, has allowed us to develop technology that delivers the price and performance the market requires.”
Beare noted the company’s underlying goal is to revolutionize the way people access the Internet by providing a cost-effective, high-performance wireless networked communication solution to the market.
According to Radiata, the IEEE 802.11a standard not only provides higher bandwidth than other technologies available today, but by using the 5 GHz spectrum band, offers clearer spectrum in an office or home environment. Other wireless network solutions rely on the unlicensed 2.4 GHz spectrum, which is crowded by other household wireless appliances including cordless phones, microwave ovens and Bluetooth-enabled products.
Radiata expects to unveil its wireless network solution before the end of the year at an estimated price of $150, which it says is comparable in price to today’s 11 Mbps PCMCIA wireless Network Interface Cards.
Chris Fisher, vice president of sales and marketing for Radiata, explained that while the company is confident of IEEE 802.11a as a wireless office networking standard, Radiata plans to deliver wireless networking products based on other standards-based and non-standards-based technology in the future.
“We are not technology religious. If a better service comes out, we will definitely take a look at it.”
