So just how much geography can you cover with these systems? The vendors whose products we tested claim ranges from 1 to 15 miles, and while more expensive offerings are available from some vendors that will extend range even farther, the products we tested hit the sweet spot for most organizations. For more information on range, see "How Far Can You Go?".
What about speed? The short answer is you're likely covered for most mainstream business applications. The products we tested had throughputs ranging from 7 Mbps to 78 Mbps. Even the slowest was faster than most inexpensive 2.4-GHz bridges. And if this isn't fast enough, Proxim offers a rather pricey unlicensed bridge that has a data rate of 480 Mbps.
Overall, we were disappointed in the devices' management and monitoring capabilities, which we consider important for mission-critical deployments. Some products include remote-status monitoring tools, system logs and firmware upgrade utilities. Others include none of the above. Again, you can enhance monitoring if you tie these systems directly to a backbone router, but we'd like more management intelligence at the units.
Security is always a top concern for wireless implementations, but we don't consider it nearly as big an issue with fixed wireless as with wireless LANs. First, most of these products use proprietary radio-signaling schemes, and in this case, proprietary is good. Second, because these are point-to-point systems employing highly directional antennas, the most viable attack is literally a man-in-the-middle attack, though the man would need to be suspended in mid-air to intercept the signals. And if that's not enough, most vendors support some kind of encryption system.
With these caveats in mind, Proxim's QuickBridge 60 narrowly edged out Wi-LAN's AWE 120-58 as our Editor's Choice. Proxim's solution has just the right mix of performance, range, ease of installation and management functionality. We like the overall functionality of Wi-LAN's product, and if you can live with sub-10 Mbps performance, it's an excellent choice. RadioLAN offers nice features and the lowest price of any product tested. We were also intrigued by Airaya's innovative AI108, the first point-to-point bridge to be built around a low-cost commodity 5-GHz WLAN chipset.
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