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Focus
Wireless: What Works?
2/3/2006
Who’s Using It?
One of the first companies to market in this new arena is GigaBeam Corp. (www.gigabeam.com), which started business in 2004 and already boasts four higher education customers: Boston University, Dartmouth College (NH), Oklahoma State University, and the University of Maryland. BU and OSU each have a building link used to transport medical files, including radiographs (“x-rays” to most of us). Dartmouth and Maryland make use of the large-capacity links for data communications between sites.
GigaBeam claims “reliable point-to-point two-way communications at up to 2.7Gbps with 99.999 percent weather availability for about a mile or more” and calls its product WiFiber. The products currently available provide up to 1.25Gbps capacity.
This skeptic needed some real-life input, so I conducted a reality check with David Bucciero, the company’s director of Technical Services, and Kathy Frazer, the manager of Technical Services at Dartmouth College. According to Bucciero, “Dartmouth has a reputation as one of the most unwired campuses in the nation and as being on the leading edge in technology, [thus] the use of millimeter wave technology can be considered an extension of that.”
Dartmouth also happens to be in a location where installing fiber is problematic. There’s too much granite to bury it cost-effectively, and the owners of utility poles in that area set a high value on the use/leasing of that real estate. So when the college determined it needed a high-capacity link to the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) and needed to get it up and running quickly, Technical Services looked at a number of wireless alternatives. DHMC had a leased ATM connection, and the backup to that was via satellite, which could not provide sufficient bandwidth if the primary link failed. Due primarily to the available data rate, the college selected the millimeter wave solution.
The initial installation of the system was up in just a few days. But after a short time, the college was seeing loss in the link. GigaBeam sent technicians who diagnosed the problem and stayed on site until it was corrected. Since that first glitch, the system has been running smoothly and is now used as an always-on system, which load-shares with the leased circuit. The satellite connection has since been discontinued.
After that success, the college added another link between ISTS and the new Rugby Clubhouse. In this case, the line of sight was somewhat marginal. The GigaBeam technicians warned Dartmouth’s Technical Services that growth of trees could be an issue, and it was. To resolve the problem, the college recently increased the height of the pole on which one antenna is mounted. The new link is now the only connection between the buildings and is functioning as advertised. In fact, Dartmouth is running Cisco (www.cisco.com) voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone traffic over this link. And Technical Services is considering a third implementation.
Is It Compatible With Current Wireless?
Because Wi-Fi and millimeter wave use completely different frequency ranges, there’s no need to worry about interference between them. In fact, E-band could become a backhaul facility for an otherwise isolated building in which you’d like to install Wi-Fi but haven’t because there hasn’t been a feasible way to connect it to the rest of the campus.
How Much Will It Set Us Back?
A single link between two sites costs about $50,000. If that number seems high, compare it to the cost of burying new fiber along a mile-long route, which typically starts at $75,000, but can be as high as $250,000 in an urban environment. (According to Bucciero at Dartmouth, the millimeter wave system had an ROI of less than eight months, compared to fiber.)
As is typical in the technology arena, you can anticipate that costs will decrease as more manufacturers bring products to market. L'ea Corp. (www.l'eacom.com)—truly a pioneer in the market since its inception in 2000—has a number of users, including the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology. Another vendor that has announced, but as of this writing is not yet shipping millimeter wave products, is BridgeWave Communications (www.bridgewave.com).
To sum up, if there’s a pressing need for high-capacity wireless on your campus now, E-band/millimeter wave/“virtual fiber” may be the right choice for you.
Wendy Chretienis a Network Systems Consultants with Elert & Associates , an independent technology consultancy.
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