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Some cool things are going on in the city of Richardson, a suburb of Dallas where my main business office is located. I've linked to an article below that I think some of you will enjoy reading. It's about Wireless Mesh Technology, which could quite possibly have a major impact on communications in the future. The article is quite long, so ADD sufferers beware!
A couple of tidbits as the technology relates to Richardson itself:
Article: A Most Disruptive Technology
A couple of tidbits as the technology relates to Richardson itself:
Within 10 months, Richardson will have the most advanced wireless broadband system in the world, what we think of as a third generation mesh system. Over this time, the company will be installing approximately 700 basketball-sized access points (APs) throughout the city on light poles, buildings and other infrastructure. This will lay a very dense high speed wireless broadband blanket over the entire city. Each access point has six radios in it. For the technically minded, this is a single silicon tunable chip, radio mesh network digitally interfacing with every network layer and able to automatically adjust in real time.
This is the first of its kind in the world. I smile when I think that one of our major competitors produced a white paper about a year ago detailing why such a multi-radio system could not work, even as we deployed our initial three radio system, which has been successfully working (through Texas summers, winters and tornadoes) for over a year. We will look at more about the technology of the system in a minute but let's look at what it can do.
First and foremost, it delivers bandwidth on the public wi-fi spectrum to the end user, the so-called last mile, at a speed unrivalled by its wire bound brethren. And at the end of the day, that is what consumers really want: high speed bandwidth. They really are agnostic as to how they get it. Just serve it up, as fast as you can and easy to use. Oh, and can you please make it cheap?
Every citizen in the City of Richardson will be able to access 756 Kbps of internet connectivity for free, from anywhere in the city. They will be able to access the internet from their homes, schools, restaurants and parks using standard wi-fi connections which are now installed on almost every notebook computer. That is almost as fast as many so-called high speed broadband connections that one pays dearly for today, and several times faster than the various hotspots at your local coffee shops. And I should note that the tax-payers of the City of Richardson are not paying one penny for this, and in fact are going to see additional revenues as a benefit.
Article: A Most Disruptive Technology