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NEWS

"Mesh Comes to WiMax"

by Eric Griffith, Wi-Fi Planet 19 September: "SkyPilot Networks of Santa Clara, California, hasn't made as big a splash in the metropolitan-sized mesh network market as its competition, but that might change as it puts its Synchronous Mesh Protocol (SMP) to work with long-distance, high-throughput WiMax technology...

"Brian Jenkins, vice present of product management at SkyPilot, says traditional point-to-multipoint (P2MP) WiMax, using base stations broadcasting to multiple customer premises units (CPEs), has 'limited scalability - mesh is the exact opposite. There's no base station, but lots of smaller deployments with limited range. However, they have multiple hops and redundancy.'

"SkyPilot equipment uses sectorized antennas to replicate the P2MP benefits. Place in an array, the antennas provide 360° coverage but with 'all the specialties of mesh,' says Jenkins. He lists those specialties as traffic routing, fault tolerance, scalable capacity and load balancing..."

[WiMAX: 19 September 2005]