EarthLink Captures A Dragon
EarthLink named Canadian fixed-wireless broadband house DragonWave, a six-year-old startup, as a wireless backhaul supplier for its municipal mesh projects, including the highly controversial and closely watched project in Philadelphia. DragonWave appears to have unseated Motorola for at least some, or perhaps all, of the EarthLink business. The value of the deal wasn't disclosed, but it could quickly propel DragonWave far closer to the top of the wireless backhaul heap. In addition to Philadelphia, EarthLink already has contracts in New Orleans, and in Anaheim and Milpitas, Calif. - and it's bidding on something like 50 to 75 more cities. DragonWave could wind up providing the wireless backhaul for all of them. DragonWave isn't a stranger to municipal broadband meshes, but its victories until now have been for relatively small projects, including those in Barrie, Ontario and Billings, Mont. EarthLink had been expected to use Motorola's Canopy fixed-wireless system as its only backhaul for at least its first five municipal mesh deployments, including Philadelphia. At the same time as naming Canopy, EarthLink had designated Tropos as supplier for the Wi-Fi mesh transmitters. It said that it was going to use Tropos' MetroMesh Wi-Fi mesh hardware and the Tropos Control suite of configuration, monitoring and maintenance tools. Curiously, EarthLink also had designated Motorola as the systems integrator for the meshes. None of the companies involved could be reached for clarification by press time. What EarthLink has ordered up is DragonWave's AirPair, which can be deployed in either licensed or unlicensed frequencies ranging from 11 GHz to 38 GHz. The AirPair is claimed to deliver scalable, ultra-low latency, wire-speed native Ethernet with as much as 500 Mb/s full-duplex bandwidth. DragonWave says the system can be used to deliver "five nines" quality of service. "The advantages of a single interference-free IP network combined with the advantages of GigE wireless mesh backhaul meet exactly the requirements" for municipal mesh networks, says DragonWave President and CEO Peter Allen. EarthLink won the Philadelphia contract last fall after major battles both over whether the city should even build a network and then after fighting off the competition in vigorous bidding. The big key is that the network won't cost the city a penny; EarthLink, which beat Hewlett-Packard in the final competition for the contract, will pick up the entire build-out cost, estimated to be between $20 million and $22 million. The actual contract itself wasn't signed until March, after which it took another two months for various legal reviews and the final go-ahead vote by the Philadelphia City Council ------------------------------------------------------------------- Duane Whittingham (N9SSN) - Producer Tom and Darryl Radio Shows & Saturday Morning Confusion Heard on C-Band Analog Satellite (W0KIE) - Telstar 6 Ch 1 - 6.2/6.8 WTND-LP Macomb 106.3, WQNA FM, WBCQ 7415 kHz & the Internet. Heard Fridays 9pm ET, Sundays 12am ET and Tuesdays 2am ET (Folk) An Independent Freeform Eclectic Radio Show. http://www.tomanddarryl.org http://www.wtnd.us Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
