In the municipal Wi-Fi arena, few companies have had such a mutually beneficial relationship as Motorola Inc. and Tropos Networks Inc. Yet that relationship came into question last week as Motorola launched its HotZone Duo Wi-Fi network equipment.
Motorola has been reselling Tropos’ MetroMesh Wi-Fi routers and Tropos Control, an end-to-end configuration, monitoring and maintenance suite, to EarthLink Inc. EarthLink is building metro Wi-Fi networks in Philadelphia, San Francisco and New Orleans. Motorola has worked as the system integrator on these projects, deploying its MOTOwi4 products, including its Canopy high-speed backhaul solution, as well as Tropos’ products.
Now Motorola is touting its new Wi-Fi gear, describing it as high-performance yet cost-effective and scalable-which sounds a lot like Tropos’ Wi-Fi offering. However, Motorola’s new hardware is a multi-radio mesh product with two Wi-Fi radios; one that runs on the 2.4 GHz band for 802.11b/g and another that runs on the 5.8 GHz band using the 802.11a standard for backhaul. Tropos’ Wi-Fi offering is a single-radio unit that must handle backhaul and access connections on a single node.
Bert Williams, senior director of marketing at Tropos, said, “It’s really all about the software, not necessarily the radios. Our software is more sophisticated than our competitors’ and is really the key to being able to scale to large network sizes.”
Williams said he believes Motorola’s new Wi-Fi offering will not take away from the business Tropos and Motorola have been doing, pointing out that Tropos’ Wi-Fi solution is the darling of more than 300 municipal projects because it was designed from the ground up for metro-scale networks.
“They (competitors) have solved with hardware what we solved with software. Historically, it has always been more economical to solve problems with software. We think we have the best story in the industry because we have the best price performance in the industry.”
Williams also stressed that Tropos’ experience in developing Wi-Fi infrastructure would be hard for anyone to replicate and is part of what helps keep operator costs down.
“We’ve rolled our experience into our product, and we understand how to keep operational costs down while optimizing coverage and capacity where customers need it.”
For its part, Motorola said its new dual-radio unit is another “tool in the tool kit” and offers Wi-Fi network customers flexibility and options.
Tom Gruba, senior director of Wireless Broadband Marketing at Motorola, explained that some conditions simply call for dual-radio technology.
“It’s all about supplying the customer with infrastructure that suits their needs, and that often requires different types of products,” said Gruba.
Motorola’s desciption of its products seems to indicate that Motorola’s HotZone Duo, combined with its MeshPlanner, will indeed compete with Tropos’ Wi-Fi suite of products. But until pricing is announced, it’s hard to estimate how stiff the competition between the two portfolios will be.
Currently, Motorola is testing HotZone Duo in Apopka, Fla., a suburb located about 15 miles northwest of Orlando with a population of about 26,000 people. On the other side of town in St. Cloud, Fla., a town of about 28,000 residents, Tropos is still tweaking the 15-square-mile citywide Wi-Fi network it built in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard Co.
The “free” network launched in March and is serving more than 4,000 registered households relatively well. Granted, there have been some coverage problems, but that’s to be expected and is easy enough to remedy as problems are reported.
