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Bridging The Miles With 10-Mbps Spread Spectrum Wireless Networking

By Joel Conover Take a closer look at your next corporate phone bill. Chances are you're paying for a leased-line service to connect local satellite offices to the corporate network. Instead of laying out money for a leased line, you could use a wireless network. But when you hear the words wireless network, you may cringe at the thought of slow, unreliable connections that suffer from chronic lack of bandwidth and frequent service outages.

True, with traditional wireless systems, your options are limited: 2-Mbps to 4-Mbps wireless spread-spectrum solutions with 1-Mbps to 3-Mbps nominal throughput, or high-end microwave dishes that carry additional cost and labor for installation, maintenance and alignment. And then there are pitfalls like rain fade and temperature sensitivity in some areas.

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Last year, Clarion Corp. announced a new spread-spectrum radio that operates in the 2.4-GHz band and offers up to 10-Mbps of throughput. Three vendors, C-SPEC Corp., Solectek Corp. and Wave Wireless Networking, have used this radio to build high-speed spread-spectrum wireless LANs (see "Going the Distance With Wireless" on page 147.)

We used these solutions over a three-month period to connect a satellite office with our University of Wisconsin lab. We found performance to be at least twice that of existing wireless spread-spectrum products. Solectek's AIRLAN/Bridge 1000E topped the throughput charts with 5.40 Mbps of sustained TCP/IP traffic. The Wave Wireless and C-SPEC units came in just a hair behind, at 5.28 Mbps and 5.15 Mbps, respectively. Reliability, scalabi lity, pricing, management and bundled options were the features that set these units apart.

Of the three units tested, Wave Wireless' SPEEDLAN 10 offered the widest range of options and features, including support for multiple radios, multipoint operation and overall system stability, placing it a notch above the competition.

Wave Wireless Networking SPEEDLAN 10
Wave Wireless' SPEEDLAN 10 received top honors in the categories of performance and reliability in our tests. After months of use, the SPEEDLAN 10 was the only unit that survived our production environment without failure. This unit was built from the ground up for the high-stress environment that a wireless bridge is likely to encounter. Its modular design and large chassis allow for multiple radios and field-serviceable upgrades. The features and reliability of the SPEEDLAN 10 give it an edge over the competition.

In o ur tests, the SPEEDLAN 10 performed extremely well, with data rates as high as 5.28 Mbps. In addition, the SPEEDLAN 10 also exhibited a lower latency than other devices. In our database test, it topped out at 390 transactions per second, on par with C-SPEC's OverLAN and about 20 percent more than the Solectek unit.

While the SPEEDLAN 10 and the C-SPEC OverLAN were nearly identical in price and performance, our lab experience with the two units helped us decide which product really stood up to the biggest challenges.

Setting up and configuring the SPEEDLAN 10 was a snap--just plug it in, point the antennas and configure the bridge with the management software that's included. We had the unit installed and operational in less than a day.

Line of sight is a requirement for these bridges--unfortunately, the SPEEDLAN 10 does not include any software to help you align the antennas. For most links under three miles, this is not an issue. However, Wave Wireless assured us that an alignment utility is on the way.

The SPEEDLAN 10 is more than just a point-to-point bridge. For starters, it supports point-to-multipoint traffic, meaning you can have several satellite locations serviced by a single central bridge but all the units contend for an aggregate 10-Mbps of bandwidth.

To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the 10-Mbps Wireless Bridge Features charts, click here.