MAXIMUM SCALABILITY

You need good software to scale. This is one of those basic, unchanging statements that holds true for any networking technology. Think about how we progressed in wired networking from bridged enterprise LANs to the routed Internet, or in the wireless voice world when we moved from analog cellular along to today's higher-capacity digital voice systems. Software. Intelligent software that contains millions of lines of code, each working together to create a system that can deliver voice and data on a large scale. And by large scale, we don't mean a couple of buildings on a campus successfully interconnected. We mean large scale, as in multinational network footprints, serving millions of users.

At Tropos®, we often wonder why people would assume that metro-scale Wi-Fi would require a different approach. This is reality: you absolutely must have intelligent software in order to scale. Period. That's why we founded the company on the software-first principle. It's why we've got a team of the best routing and software engineers in the world working on this stuff every day. It's the software.

Our patented Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP®) scales to thousands of nodes. It doesn't use complicated routing tables that eventually consume all available bandwidth as the network grows. In fact, the routing overhead of PWRP never exceeds 5% of available network bandwidth, regardless of network size. Every other mesh vendor in the industry uses some variation on wireline protocols such as Layer 2 bridging or link state/distance vector routing. Don't these guys know that these protocols were proven not to be scalable in a wired environment? Why in the world would you expect them to scale in a metro-scale wireless environment? Bottom line, they fundamentally will not. Only Tropos MetroMesh™, with PWRP, can deliver the scalability necessary to build national and multinational network footprints.

The Tropos MetroMesh OS is the only mesh OS in the industry to integrate seamless mobility into the centralized authentication systems used by large network operators. Tropos' novel use of GRE tunneling and BGP routing makes the core routers used by network operators mobility-aware for the first time. This allows user traffic to make its way through a secure tunnel through the Internet to a centralized access control and authentication system, while at the same time allowing users to move seamlessly within and between networks, all with session-persistence. Without these capabilities, you can't roll out national or multinational networks, and without these capabilities you certainly can't dream to operate profitable networks supporting millions of users.

Now that we've established that you can build really large subscriber networks with Tropos MetroMesh, one question remains…how the heck do you manage these networks without breaking the bank? Tropos pioneered a family of software tools that provides centralized visibility, analysis and control of highly dispersed mesh network systems.

Tropos Control is the metro Wi-Fi industry's most powerful element management system. It enables network operators to perform a plethora of important functions, including over-the-air configuration and updates of Tropos MetroMesh routers, whole network performance monitoring and statistical capture. With Tropos Control, you can perform all these functions and more from the comfort of your network operations center…no pesky and expensive truck rolls.

Tropos Insight is an advanced MetroMesh network analyzer and optimizer. It gives you unprecedented visibility into network-wide performance and usage statistics. Not just mesh performance, but mesh-to-PoP performance and mesh-to-client performance as well. Tropos Insight incorporates an advanced statistical package that correlates data from across a MetroMesh network and presents the collected information in a dashboard view. You can even drill down deeper into the information, utilizing any of the more than 70 reports that Tropos Insight delivers.

Want more details? Tropos Insight retrieves data from the MetroMesh OS instrumentation embedded in each MetroMesh router. It provides system-wide data correlation and identifies opportunities for performance optimization. This tool enables you to keep up with the dynamic RF environment and changing demands of your user base quickly and at low cost.

The centralized visibility, analysis and control capabilities of Tropos MetroMesh analysis and control tools minimize the time, personnel and truck rolls required to operate far-flung wireless mesh networks while facilitating an outstanding user experience. Without these types of tools, it'd be impossible to operate a network without committing to astronomical operating costs…not too many smart business people out there willing to do that.

This is reality: you absolutely must have intelligent software in order to scale. Period. It's why we've got a team of the best routing and software engineers in the world working on this stuff every day. It's why we designed a mesh routing protocol whose overhead stays constant at an incredibly low level no matter how large the network. It's why we pioneered a family of software tools that provides centralized visibility, analysis and control of highly dispersed mesh network systems. It's why the Tropos MetroMesh solution is the only mesh system in the world that can scale to a national or multinational network footprint.

It's the software.