SkyPilot Touches Down At Low End Of Muni Wi-Fi

As more and more municipal wireless networks are deployed, cities and service providers are finding that fulfilling promises of citywide coverage over the unlicensed spectrum is more difficult than anticipated.

Seeing a market opportunity, SkyPilot on Monday announced a new access point -- known as the SkyAccess DualBand -- that it hopes will help fill holes in wide-area Wi-Fi networks at a relatively low expense.

A streamlined version of SkyPilot's flagship SkyExtender DualBand product, the new dual-radio devices will not extend a mesh network, but will act as edge connections that provide the last hop of the system. Like SkyExtender, the new devices have two radios: a mesh backhaul component operating in the 4.9 GHz to 5.8 GHz frequency band, and a Wi-Fi access point that operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band. In addition to providing high-speed Internet access to residential and business users, the dual-radio SkyAccess offers backhaul connections over distances up to 12 kilometers, the company said, to upstream mesh nodes.

The new device is "really a coverage fill-in" product, said SkyPilot VP of product marketing Brian Jenkins, "that offers increased flexibility to service providers."

Using the SkyAccess nodes at the edge of the network can reduce overall capital expenses for network build-outs by up to 33%, Jenkins claims.That's an important benefit in a market where many service providers are finding it more costly than expected to build out Wi-Fi networks in densely populated urban areas. In San Francisco, a partnership with Google and EarthLink to provide a citywide network was among the earliest and most ballyhooed municipal Wi-Fi deals. Public criticism has mounted over, among other things, the level of coverage planned for the system. In Mountain View, Calif., Google has built a Wi-Fi network designed as a test-bed for future state-of-the-art systems. Even there, users have complained about the spotty coverage.

Many experts also have warned that that municipal mesh networks will be plagued by radio-frequency interference, slowing connection speeds to dial-up levels.

The result: wireless providers have been forced to provide node densities (i.e., the number of radios per square mile) much higher than in their designs, pushing the expense of building such networks to unforeseen levels.

The SkyAccess device is designed to fill holes in the network without driving budgets to the point where business models become nonviable.

"The price point of the SkyAccess DualBand allows us to fill in the coverage gaps and expand the reach of our overall service area without breaking our budget," Jim McKenna, president and CEO of RedZone Wireless, a provider based in Rockland, Maine, said in a statement."Since a last-hop mesh node doesn't need to repeat the wireless signal, we designed this product to provide the same performance and coverage at a lower cost," Jenkins said.

At a list price of $1,799, the SkyAccess DualBand costs about half as much as a SkyExtender node.