Startup Wavion today introduced a MIMO-based metro-scale access point they say has advantages in performance and penetration for metro Wi-Fi deployments reports WiFi Planet, WiFiNetNews, Telecom Magazine, ZD Net and Silicon Beat.

Transmitting four different beams to four different clients using the same channel results in four times the capacity without changing the customer premises equipment (CPE), claims Wavion. Backed by more than $22 million in funding from blue-chip investors such as Sequoia Capital, Wavion says their spatially adaptive AP can do work of three to four conventional APs.

Wavion says it can double the range from 600 feet (typical for gear like Tropos) to 1,200 feet. The increased range means that three to four times fewer access points are needed, lowering equipment costs by half.

Their MIMO technology with beamforming and space-division multiple-access (SDMA) delivers different "beams" to different users, somewhat like the ill-fated Vivato. Wavion uses custom designed ASICs and embedded software to optimally leverage six antennas and six radio transceivers in a single AP.

Claimed benefits include:

• Performance: MIMO results in better coverage, higher bandwidth, scalable voice, and more reliable public safety applications. Applied to mesh networks, this technology also enables higher performance backhaul and fewer hops between nodes.
• Penetration: Buildings, walls, radio interference, and blocked line-of-sight are better mitigated by Wavion's spatially adaptive AP because of significantly higher link gain and better multipath exploitation through digital beamforming.
• Profitability: A single Wavion spatially adaptive AP quadruples the coverage and capacity of current metro Wi-Fi technology, which reduces capital expenses of typical deployments by 50 percent and operating expenses by more than 50 percent. Moreover, providers can reduce their need to sell and support customer premises equipment.

Wavion will build and sell its own access points, but it doesn't expect to compete with Tropos and BelAir. Instead, it plans to partner with those companies, so they can add Wavion technology to their own products.

"Beamforming and SDMA are the ideal technologies for the outdoor wireless environment. They also leverage the millions of existing Wi-Fi clients already in use around the world," said Dr. Mati Wax, Wavion's founder and CTO and one of the industry's early pioneers in multiple-antenna technology.

Initially, Waveon will introduce products in the 2.4 GHz 802.11 b/g profile but it will support 802.11a in the 5.8 GHz range with a radio change.

Now all they need is a product and customers.

The GO xRF adaptive beamforming smart antenna is also aiming for Metro Wi-Fi business. Their adaptive antenna arrays use GO’s xRF engine, based on a patent-pending implementation of adaptive beamforming and smart antenna signal processing algorithms.

Metro Broadband Wireless (MBW) from Go Networks (right) will consist of roof or tower mounted micro base stations panel antennas with 120-degree coverage and smaller pico cells to fill in coverage gaps at street level. The pico cells can form a mesh network using the 5GHz 802.11a for backhaul connections.

WiFiNetNews opines:

Like Go Networks, Wavion isn’t a mesh company. Go has some mesh capability, but Wavion connects directly to backhaul from its nodes. With fewer nodes, you don’t need mesh for backhaul because you’ve already aggregated quite a lot of data.

And metro-scale companies like Strix, SkyPilot, and BelAir aren’t really using mesh for backhaul but a series of switched or dedicated point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links.

Mesh has become the wrong synonym for metro-scale Wi-Fi/wireless.

Strix Systems next month will start shipping the Edge Wireless System, a two-radio box for residential users and small businesses. Client devices inside a building often don't have signals strong enough to reach outdoor access points. Their EWS100 uses one radio to provide a strong indoor signal, and the other to connect to a Strix-based outdoor mesh. So far Strix has disclosed only one service provider with plans for the EWS100 -- CitiWifi, which serves Tampa, Florida, reports Light Reading.

Wavion sounds alot like Arraycom's Adaptive Antenna technology (above) that may be used in some mobile WiMAX basestations.

Beamforming and "space division" is included in the Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) standard as an "extra" feature. Standard Mobile WiMAX implimentations also include subchannelization. That allows a client to concentrate their transmit power on a subset (subchannel) of the total OFDM subcarriers for stronger (but slower) uplinks, enhancing range and capacity.

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