May 2008

Neil Olsen, VP of Marketing, Generonix

Why isn’t setting up a municipal Wi-Fi as easy as putting up one in your home? The designer of outdoor Wi-Fi networks faces two unique challenges: acquiring power to feed outdoor municipal Wi-Fi equipment and setting up a high-bandwidth backhaul connection to the Internet. Mesh networking technology, such as Tropos offers, goes a long way towards helping reduce the number of nodes requiring fiber optic or wireless backhaul, but all nodes must still be powered.

The solution up until now has been to use commercial AC for power and fiber or wireless for backhaul. Negotiations with power utilities for un-metered or flat rate outdoor power at the locations needed for municipal Wi-Fi nodes can be difficult and lengthy. Alternate power sources, such as solar panels may face aesthetic and climate issues, and still require outdoor battery backup.

For service providers with access to the copper network outside plant facilities (directly as an ILEC or CLEC, or as ISP using a phone company service), CopperReach from Generonix can eliminate the need for commercial power and simplify the provisioning of network backhaul. CopperReach is an innovative technology that provides line power, or line power and DSL or fiber backhaul in one easy to install outdoor enclosure. Using the existing copper telephone infrastructure reduces the time and cost to deploy Wi-FI networks.

CopperReach can be used by those service providers with access to the copper outside network to deploy their own outdoor Wi-Fi networks, or it could be used by the ILEC’s to provide a new “carrier service” to support third party managed municipal Wi-Fi deployments. The service would offer remote network power and broadband Ethernet backhaul using either DSL or fiber. It could be installed to a remote location as quickly as POTS services are delivered today.

What if it was easy? What if you contacted a provider and an hour later you had power and broadband connectivity and a mesh Wi-Fi radio powered-up and working? What if it was scalable and you could add radios one at a time? If “what if” were “now”, the municipal Wi-Fi providers could then focus on what they are good at: managing and promoting universal access, public safety and public service. It might just speed municipal Wi-Fi deployments.

The Generonix CopperReach product has the potential to speed municipal Wi-Fi by turning these “What if?” questions into practical answers. It is a specially designed, environmentally hardened field node that provides up to 120W of central office power and broadband Ethernet to outdoor equipment on as few as one copper pair per 60 watts of output power. It provides options for powering up to 120 watts of 48 volt DC and/or 100 watts of 110 volt AC, or up to four of the increasingly popular “plug and play” Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices. Thus it can provide power for multiple Wi-Fi radios or other outdoor devices, such as IP network surveillance cameras, video display, or traffic control equipment.

CopperReach uses integrated advanced DSL technologies to provide inexpensive broadband Ethernet backhaul over the existing copper outside plant network. These lines can be configured with symmetrical up/down stream bandwidth to support emerging VoIP and video surveillance applications. Such lines are quickly deployed, remotely managed from a central location, and very cost competitive at $20-$60 per month for residential subscribers. Where fiber cable is available, CopperReach can provide both reliable network power and a fiber media converter in a single easy to install enclosure.

And best of all, CopperReach can be deployed rapidly The phone company just dispatches a bucket-lift truck to the field, sets up some line connections in the central office and turns on the service. This means:

• Installation takes less than one hour. A specially designed weatherproof and environmentally hardened CopperReach enclosure clamps on the overhead strand or bolts onto the pole to provide power and Ethernet to a variety of outdoor devices.
• Outdoor Wi-Fi radio installation is reduced from months to minutes. The phone company takes a service order, dispatches a truck and turns on a service, and manages the network service. As an example, the CopperReach node pictured above took only 45 minutes to install.
• It is as easy as ordering a phone line. The phone company can also mount the Tropos radio at the same time, reducing installation to a single truck roll. They provide power and broadband DSL or Fiber access and manage the backhaul network. They manage the FCC-mandated reliable power in the central office.

Management of applications running over the municipal network is also now independent of the infrastructure: municipal Wi-Fi, 4.9 GHz public safety, or surveillance networks can even be managed by separate entities, each of which focuses on their own core competence. And the phone company now has a new monthly recurring revenue stream using existing outside plant assets. With network line power and embedded DSL/Fiber technologies, municipal Wi-Fi is easier to plan, lower cost, incrementally scalable, highly reliable and quick to deploy in the places people live and work today.

So with CopperReach from Generonix we can make municipal Wi-Fi easy and fast to deploy. We can spread it as fast as we spread phones, dial-up Internet, cable, DSL, and other successful technologies, and spread it without building a new infrastructure We can put it up one node at a time, and it will take one hour to set up and have one neighborhood online. One node, one neighborhood, one hour. “What if” has become “We can”.

Tropos Radio and CopperReach Strand Mounted Enclosure

Links: Generonix Speeds Deployment of Municipal Wi-Fi in Frontier Network

The views expressed in this Guest Commentary are those of its author and are not necessarily reflective of Tropos Networks views. Tropos Networks, its partners and customers are not responsible for the third-party Guest Commentary content.

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