LAS VEGAS -- The show floor at this year's Networld+Interop exhibition may be spookily quiet, but the air between the booths is filled with noise.
Radio noise, that is. As predicted, 802.11 is everywhere at the trade fair this year, and that means interference is also all around, providing a foretaste of what a world full of 802.11 could really be like (see N+I: Congestion Problems?).
Trapeze Networks Inc. is in the thick of it, running a private 802.11a (54-Mbit/s over 5GHz) network in one of the central exhibition halls. "I ran Netstumbler [a cult network sniffing application] and there must be 45 access points out there," Brian Bailey, a product marketing type for the startup, told Unstrung. "And they're all committing every kind of sin."
Sadly -- despite the fact that this is Vegas -- Bailey only means that the access points are using overlapping radio channels and performing all kinds of other heinous deeds that make RF engineers (but few others) go weak at the knees.
Normally, running a 5GHz 802.11a hotspot takes an access point out of the crowded 2.4GHz band inhabited by the much more popular 802.11b standard. However, "there's quite a bit of a stuff running here," Bailey notes. He says Trapeze did some "sneaky stuff" with its switch to ensure the network ran smoothly, but your Unstrung correspondent couldn't access the members-only Trapeze network to see whether their efforts were successful (see Trapeze's High Wireless Act for more on Trapeze's technology).
In fact, a lot of the WLAN equipment vendors have rented nearby hotel suites to talk to the press and run demos. Of course, this is partly because of economic necessity -- it's cheaper to rent a room than a big booth at the show.
However, as Blaine Kohl, VP of marketing at Bandspeed Inc. observes (from the comfort of an airconditioned suite overlooking the Nevada desert): "Its difficult to do any kind of meaningful demonstration [of this technology] down there." (See Startups Add to Switch Mix for more on Bandspeed.)
Just spoke with the LV Convention Center authority. Turns out, LV Convention Center has about 2 million square feet.
Just as a point of reference, if at the last show, they would have had a WLAN network powered by CWN's TRUErate technology, and since data throughput scales directly with the size of the coverage area, then the total aggregate data throughput provided by TRUErate would have been approximately 8 Gigabits per second. If 108 Mbps. raw data rate was used instead of the current 54 Mbps. then the aggregate available data throughput would have been in the 16 Gigabits per second range. If data compression was also present further increases in data throughput would have resulted.
TRUErate technology allows us to do something that no other WLAN technology allows you to do, the ability to overlap cell coverage areas without causing any interference, ad infinitum, allowing for densely populated AP infrastructures.
As hard as this may be to believe, this technology exists and has been verified both algorithmically and through various simulations.
TRUErate the solution to the N+I WLAN Noise problems
It looks like the WLAN noise problems at the N+I show in L.V. Nevada are the classic problems that occur when there are multiple overlapped 802.11 Access Points, and multiple and varying number of users. The wireless network becomes congested and the amount of available real data throughput becomes unreliable. I would think this does play havoc with anybody’s live wireless demonstrations at the minimum.
Corporate WaveNet’s TRUErate directly addresses this problem by allowing all of the Access Points to cooperatively share the network without causing congestion. Further, the varying number of users at any moment in time does not have any effect on the congestion of the network. With the addition of TRUErate’s zero-overhead QoS facility, bandwidth can be provisioned for various classes of users. This might enable pay-for-service wireless networking at tradeshows, for example.
In real numbers, if we assume that each tradeshow floor is approximately 150,000 sq. ft. (I don’t know the exact dimensions of the LV floors), and that there are 2 tradeshow floors, a TRUErate deployment can deliver aggregate 1.2 Gpbs. of sustained real application data throughput, using the current 802.11 modulation schemes. When 802.11n delivers the promised 108 Mbps. then the aggregate throughput would jump to 2+ Gbps. In a fully deployed system, the sustained throughput would be available throughout the tradeshow floors with no deadspots, regardless of the number of wireless LAN users or their locations.
TRUErate can enable locations such as tradeshow floors to go completely wireless for virtually all of their data communications needs. Please visit www.corporatewavenet.com for more information.
The blogs and comments are the opinions only of the writers and do not reflect the views of Unstrung. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
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