As EarthLink Inc. prepares to unwire Pasadena, Calif., using gear from Tropos Networks Inc. and Motorola Inc., another vendor is celebrating the deployment of its Wi-Fi mesh network equipment in Red River, N.M., where Enchanted Circle Communications launched a wireless broadband network using equipment from Santa Clara, Calif.-based MeshDynamics.
Situated about 20 miles south of the Colorado border, Red River has about 2,500 homes, most of which house part-time vacationers who don’t need year-round services, preferring to pay for Internet access during visits. To meet this part-time demand, Enchanted Circle Communications L.L.C. recently began offering usage packages based on individual needs. But it hasn’t been easy setting up the network in the town’s remote setting.
The challenge in Red River, according to Keith Hall, president of Enchanted Circle, is to serve up to about 15,000 subscribers in a long, narrow valley situated at about 9,000 feet above sea level in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Though the network’s subscribers are mostly part-time residents of the area, many of them combine work with pleasure during extended visits, requiring reliable, high-speed Internet access. Due to the town’s location, terrain and lack of full-time users, the cost of wired connections was never a practical economic proposition.
However, traditional Wi-Fi mesh networking did not serve the 1 1/2-miles long, 3-blocks-wide town adequately, as the initial network didn’t “hop” well during busy periods. Hall said the wired Ethernet connection is located at the southeast end of town, which is about six hops away from the other end of town.
“I began searching for a more advanced alternative, and after the folks at MeshDynamics came out and showed me what their Wi-Fi equipment could do, I knew I had found something that could meet our needs,” explained Hall.
So Hall set about ripping out the existing network and quickly installed MeshDynamics’ MD4000 products, which are designed to offer more consistent bandwidth across the entire network.
Hall also noted that MeshDynamics’ equipment was simple to install, which the company says is part of its growth strategy.
“The first set of nodes went up, and immediately, they found each other and established the wireless mesh network without a lot of engineering,” said Byron Henderson, vice president of sales and marketing at MeshDynamics. “Our secret sauce is our software, which is based partly on distributed RF robot technology, giving individual nodes some autonomy to make decisions and talk to other nodes. The nodes are autonomous, but coordinated, enabling the network to hop as much as it needs to without giving up much signal strength or quality.”
But back in Pasadena, where EarthLink won a contract to build, own and operate a 23-square mile citywide Wi-Fi municipal network for commercial and government use, Tropos and Motorola are set to provide Wi-Fi mesh hardware, just as they are in a number of other California cities.
EarthLink said the Pasadena project will likely include a digital inclusion program for certain qualifying residents to provide discounted Internet access, and that the network will provide speeds of 1 megabit per second. Though the City of Pasadena will be an anchor tenant on the network, EarthLink said it plans to let multiple, competing providers offer services to consumers and businesses over its network.
