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Wireless Networking Hardware

Cisco To Unveil Wireless Mesh Hardware 70

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the no-strings-to-hold-me-down dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CRN is reporting that Cisco will enter the wireless mesh networking fray next week. Since aquiring Airespace Cisco has been working hard to bring their own mesh technology to fruition. The new solution will target businesses who wish to move the traditional Wi-Fi network outside and possibly cover large regions."
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Cisco To Unveil Wireless Mesh Hardware More

Cisco To Unveil Wireless Mesh Hardware

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  • OK, I admit I haven't RTFA but it seems to me that WiFi plus some nice software should make a mesh. Doesn't seem like a hardware thing to me.

    • Re:Why hardware? (Score:5, Informative)

      by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:18PM (#13990029) Homepage Journal
      I attended a future of wireless conference in Madison, WI a few weeks ago, they had a keynote speaker from Cisco who talked about this very technology. The things its hardware can do is impressive. And yes, a lot of it could (and is) taken care of via software. These mesh nodes can detect other nodes and alther their signal strength to improve coverage. They can adapt to cover for another node that has gone down. They can immediatly detect unauthorized access points and alert NetAdmins of a potential security issue. These systems are self contained, you don't need to wire each one to the network, they just need juice except for the gateway which can run off of power over ethernet. No expencive wire pulling. No manual configuration. Just plug it in and go.

      -Rick
    • "Mesh hardware" is in fact an 802.11 access point with different firmware.
    • it seems to me that WiFi plus some nice software should make a mesh. Doesn't seem like a hardware thing to me.

      Doesn't have to be a hardware thing, but when you're Cisco, everything should be solved with hardware.
      • Which would explain why Linksys (Cisco) WRT54G wireless routers (Can be found for under $50 US) can form a mesh with custom firmware, but why Linksys' own default firmware doesn't support it.

        Their "new" mesh stuff seems to go beyond a simple mesh, but considering how their own existing wireless devices can pretty much already do what they're announcing, I'm not seeing anything truly special here.

        And I would imagine that most of the "new" stuff could be added to existing mesh-supporting firmware.

    • Re:Why hardware? (Score:5, Informative)

      by tosspot1 ( 663265 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:04PM (#13990390)
      I find this announcement from Cisco quite puzzelling. It's not really a mesh - more of a star. A true mesh means that each node can talk to many other nodes. In Cisco's proposed solution they have a central node attaching (via 802.11a) to remote nodes in what seems like a star configuration.

      In a true mesh topology only one node requires a wired connection, and the traffic can be routed through nodes which attach to this node to nodes further away. If I understand Cisco's idea of a "mesh" the end nodes (the ones in the street lights) etc cannot route anything to any other nodes.

      Now the interesting thing is that people have been building mesh networks for a few years now. They take the very inexpensive WRTG54G, and put a linux image on it. From that point on it's a matter of using open source software (available in various shapes and forms) to make this very inexpensive box into a true mesh node.

      I think another point which is being lost here is that people (including municipalities) want to roll these things out at low cost. Because nobody wants to pay huge money to access them, and the coverage of an individual node is so small, the cost per access point must be low, and I mean REALLY low (like under $100). Cisco will never provide a solution for these costs - that's just not how they work.

      So in the Cisco solution we have to also have a tower, so we can blast out 802.11a signal to all the nodes - also not very desirable. What if we want to cover a few streets and don't have proper line of sight? Suddenly it means multiple towers and escalating costs. A true mesh network hands the signal between adjacent nodes so line of sight isn't always needed to cover an area.

      There are people out there rolling out working mesh networks right now, yet we are reading how there is big demand for this "new" technology. Please... Or am I missing something here?

      The only problem I see with the existing solutions based on the WRTG54G is that it isn't an outdoor device. What we need is for someone to design a little box with very lower power consumption that can handle outdoor environments, and still keep it as low cost...

      Just my two cents' worth.

      • Re:Why hardware? (Score:4, Informative)

        by MECC ( 8478 ) * on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:33PM (#13990597)
        "The Cisco solution is based on its proprietary Adaptive Wireless Path Protocol, a mesh routing technology designed to allow the wireless network to self-configure, self-optimize, resist interference and network downtime, and reduce network deployment costs"
        ...
        "The Aironet 1500 is priced at $3,999. A kit with an Aironet 1500 access point and equipment for pole-top mounting will sell for $4,645, and a 1500 with a rooftop mounting kit will sell for $4,815, according to the documents."

        So much for the 'reducing deployment costs' part...

      • Re:Why hardware? (Score:3, Informative)

        by mailseth ( 227177 )
        There are people out there rolling out working mesh networks right now, yet we are reading how there is big demand for this "new" technology. Please... Or am I missing something here?

        That's why I've been plugging the CU Wireless Network [cuwireless.net]. It is a self organizing mesh that is open source (BSD License). It is one of the first networks to use the HSLS (Hazy Sighted Link State [cuwireless.net]) algorithm.

      • Re:Why hardware? (Score:5, Informative)

        by saridder ( 103936 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:14PM (#13990965) Homepage
        Actually it really is a mesh. The "controller" is just for management traffic. All Cisco AP's can now use LWAPP, which let's the AP's get all it's management, configurations and control traffic from a centralized device. This means all security configs, polity configs, etc.. are pre-defined on a controller. No pre-configuring each AP before deployment; you just plug in an AP like you would a light bulb and it works.

        On the data plane side, they truly are mesh and can talk to any other device in that mesh.
        • Sounds like the difference there is that someone's in charge. It's hard to charge people for the use of a p2p network that they are a primary node in, just like everyone else.

  • Mesh... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tradiuz ( 926664 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:09PM (#13989947)
    Wont there at some point become a serious issue of collisions, noise, and the like if everyone decides to make their own "wireless mesh network"?

    • Re:Mesh... (Score:3, Funny)

      by VJ42 ( 860241 )
      I can se that being a problem if everyone is using the same frequency, but people arn't that stupid...;)

      • Re:Stupidity (Score:2, Funny)

        by tradiuz ( 926664 )
        Well, I would have to disagree with you on that. Look around you, note how many stupid people you can find in a 100yd radius! (Heck, look at half the posters on /. including me).
        • Indeed, you have totally faied to understand the sarcasm in my post (you deside wheather that makes you stupid or not). Of course I know people, myself included, are stupid; that was the point I was making.

  • Cost (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rinnt ( 917105 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:20PM (#13990047)
    I'm all for wireless mesh network competition, but do any of you think this could help bring the cost down? I recently had some involvement in a public safety wireless deployment project. As much as I wanted to see mesh happen, it was just simply cost prohibitive. Prices ranged from $75,000 to $150,000 per square mile. And while other solutions are out there, it's hard to get a good signal in rough terrian. The final solution? Private RF with a blazing 33Kbps connection!
    • You got lucky. We got 700Mhz equipment and ultra-super-fast 8k connection.
    • Of course a blazing 33Kbps connection is cheaper than a ~1Mbps mesh. You ought to compare mesh against 3G or Starbucks-style 802.11, where every access point has dedicated backhaul; I suspect that mesh is much cheaper in that case.
    • Like any other emerging technology (especially in relation to "high-speed" networking) the initial costs of implementation are always going to be high in comparison to an established media that was rooted into the industry. Any cost for any tech, once industrialized sees immediate turns to meet competetor's pricing. Simple economic thinking would lead one to deduce that while new anything is expenisive, give it time to establish and build a foundation in it's niche, and you'll see price wars.

      Remember when h

  • Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jerry Coffin ( 824726 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:23PM (#13990066)
    It'll be interesting to see how much different this really is from a cell phone network. Cell phones have already handled (for well over a decade) things like handing an active call off from one access point to the next. Typical wireless networks, by contrast, don't handle this well at all, and until/unless they start to, they'll remain far short of their potential.

    Of course, the other direction works as well: cell networks providing faster access. Unfortunately, most cell providers seem (to me) to be shooting themselves in the foot, charging far too high of prices for data access. IMO, they'd be better off trying to maximize market share in this segment by selling the service at near break-even pricing. I did a bit of math a while back, and figured that at least from one provider, each bit of "data" cost something like 5 times as much to transmit as each bit of "voice" -- strange, at least IMO.

    --
    The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

    • This kinda falls back to the fact that cell networks are not packet data networks by design. Adding data routing capacity took quite a lot of working out, because instead of only assigning you a cell address (your SIM card provides this bit) the system also had to pair you to an IP address and then route that with another layer to abstract your IP from the towers to ensure packets actually reached the tower your phone was paired with at the time.

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mesh networks and cellular networks, while they aim for the same blanket-coverage goal, are totally different architectures.

      The point of a mesh network is that not all the nodes in the mesh need a dedicated internet connection -- the packets from one node are routed along the mesh of peer wireless nodes until they reach an uplink/outside-world connection.

      In cellular, each tower has to have its own backhaul connection -- lots of voice circuits, some data lines -- and each client device ("phone") connects onl
    • Cell phones have already handled (for well over a decade) things like handing an active call off from one access point to the next.

      That's because the phone companies manually program in "adjacencies" - which cells are near to what. It's not the handset that says "I can see Cell 1241, I'm going to move" - it's the phone company's network that tells the phone to move.
      WiFi is a lot more ad-hoc - you can't just put up a new cell on a phone network, and expect it to work.

      • That's because the phone companies manually program in "adjacencies" - which cells are near to what. It's not the handset that says "I can see Cell 1241, I'm going to move" - it's the phone company's network that tells the phone to move.

        That's not really true -- while the base station is programmed with an adjacency list, it basically just acts as a crib for the handset. In particular, while a base station can detect when the signal from a handset is getting weak, it has no way to guess at the directi

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Surt ( 22457 )
      If by handled well you mean 'hang up on you' then I agree, cell phones do this well already.

    • Mesh networking is nothing like cellular networks. In mesh networks each node participates in the routing process, relaying packets intended for other receivers. Of course this is not the case with traditional cellular networks where routing takes place only in the based stations and the core network connecting the base stations. Furthermore, mesh (also called ad-hoc) networks are self-configurable and self-healing. You throw the nodes over an area and they themselves discover who their neighbors are, disc
      • forgive me, its at www.ember.com not www.embernet.com.

      • Re:Nothing like traditional cellular networks (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jerry Coffin ( 824726 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @03:41PM (#13991875)
        Mesh networking is nothing like cellular networks.

        Oh, I realize from a technical viewpoint they're entirely different -- but I also realize that from the viewpoint of using them, the primary differences are speed and cost; minor (!) details like who assigns addresses or how the data is routed after it gets to the ground station clearly make a big difference in how you design the network, but are (hopefully) transparent in how you use them.

        Realistically, it's true that somewhere between those, you get the job of deploying the network, and here it still makes a big difference -- particularly, in most cases, Joe Blow won't be able to install a network himself if he has to program in the handoff partners manually.

        Nonetheless, an awful lot of people get a professional to do at least major parts of network installation, and for somebody who has a clue of what they're doing, this wouldn't make a big difference in most circumstances -- you program them in once, and only mess with things when you have to replace something. Of course, being from Cisco these boxes will undoubtedly require at least a dozen commands to do anything, (or entries at a GUI designed specifically to make a command line seem as straightforward as possible) but that's just Cisco, and really has nothing to do with mesh networking...

        --
        The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

  • AP Roaming Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cletus.the.wonder.sl ( 817253 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:35PM (#13990168)
    We have multiple large warehouses with truck mounted and handheld Symbol wireless devices and each warehouse has 10 or more access points. One issue we have at times is with roaming. The current Symbol software has a bug and will not let go of an access point as readily as it should causing obvious connection issues. Does anyone know if this will address the issue as a possible work around? I will be interested in seeing if Cisco's 1200 series can also be used in conjunction with this new access point to create a mesh since we have rolled out a large number of them very recently to replace the nasty old 350s.

    • Re:AP Roaming Question (Score:3, Informative)

      by RingDev ( 879105 )
      The key note speaker at the conference I attended said he could walk from VP row in the Cisco campus, get on the tram and ride to the other side of the campus with out ever losing his connection to the network on his handheld device. He also showed some live time tracking systems (Cisco door keys apparently have some sort of WiFi device built in) where he could pull up a map of his office building, see the wireless signal overlay and all of the wireless devices, including an employee who was working late(or
    • I don't know if you can turn down the power on those devices, but it sure helped us here. We have 138 Cisco 1200 AP's in this building. First step was to turn all of them WAY down. 20mw. Then tweak a few up to fill in. After that, I noticed some of the same kind of behavior you speak of on the device side. We run either Cisco or Intel cards primarily.

      I found that turning the signal down to 20-30mw reduces the number of AP's that try to negotiate with you, and AP-to-AP handoff went a lot smoother. YMMV.
      • It also helps if the end devices are CCX (Cisco Compatable eXtention) built into their firmware. Most firmware vendors have it built in such as Intel, IBM, etc.. In normal operation a device is sticky, meaning once it has an AP, it tries to stay on it, even if there's a newer AP with better signal nearby. CCX has the smarts to constantly look for a better AP. I'm guessing that the Symbol devices don't have CCX built in.

    • Turning SSID broadcast on will vastly improve roaming performance regardless of client hardware/software.

      There are many who still feel that disabling SSID broadcast is an effective security measure (it isn't) so their wifi performance suffers.

      Google for wp_ssid_hiding.pdf...

  • Breaking the monopolies for internet access (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mollog ( 841386 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @12:54PM (#13990314)
    This is really cool. Now it becomes almost trivally easy for people to resell internet access and break the backs of the monopolies of cable and DSL internet access providers. And if this were combined with satelite downlink, everybody could have some seriously fast access for a minimal cost. Bring it on!
    • Unless you are doing truly local access you will need to tap into the landlines of a provider at some point (the sooner the better probably). They will still want to be paid for this usage...

      Also you will need some model for paying for your traffic or else there will be zero incentive to provide these connections to the backbone.
    • Also, if you rtfa, this is not what you might expect. This system allows up to 32 wireless repeaters to connect to a wired connection point. Not so impressive actually given that wireless repeaters already exist (some made out of lamp shades). It's not something that you can have on your laptop and communicate with your neighbor's laptop and thus share internet connections. As you've pointed out, that would be cool.
    • Trivially easy may be overstating things by quite a margin - if you're going to resell internet access using unlicensed frequency bands you're going to have real trouble giving any sort of guaranteed bandwidth or quality of service. There's just no (practical) way to prevent or limit interference in these bands so you can't guarantee someone won't trample all over your customers. It'll be hard for meshes to compete commercially with DSL/Cable - they're better suited to regions without DSL/Cable.
      • ...if you're going to resell internet access using unlicensed frequency bands you're going to have real trouble giving any sort of guaranteed bandwidth or quality of service. There's just no (practical) way to prevent or limit interference in these bands so you can't guarantee someone won't trample all over your customers. It'll be hard for meshes to compete commercially with DSL/Cable - they're better suited to regions without DSL/Cable.

        The issue of bandwidth and QOS already exists with the current WiF
    • "Now it becomes almost trivally easy for people to resell internet access and break the backs of the monopolies of cable and DSL internet access providers. And if this were combined with satelite downlink, everybody could have some seriously fast access for a minimal cost."
      That's right, because broadband infrastructure is actualy free, and the low cost of broad-band usage now isn't at all due to the high number of subscribers... /Idiot

  • Support Open Source Wireless Meshes! (Score:3, Informative)

    by mailseth ( 227177 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:01PM (#13990371)
    Help the CUWiN Project, it's distributed under the BSD license.

    Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network [cuwireless.net]

    (Disclaimer: I'm a contributer to said project)
  • This rooftop access point uses 802.11a to link up to 32 Aironet 1500 lightweight mesh access points

    Ok, first of all you have to connect to this central system that links to 32 remote systems. I'm not positive, but it doesn't even look like the remote systems (called Aironet 1500's) can communicate with each other. I thought the whole concept of mesh networks is having large number of users able to connect to one another. This seems more like an extension cord to your central connection point that can li
  • ...traditional Wi-Fi network...
    It's a testament to our relentless drive for forward progress that someone can write "traditional Wi-Fi network" and no one notices. I look forward to the time someone writes "traditional interface model."

  • traditional Wi-Fi network (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Eightyford ( 893696 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:24PM (#13991063) Homepage
    "traditional Wi-Fi network"

    It's words like these that show us just how fast technology is being developed.

  • compat with 802.11s ? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Since aquiring Airespace Cisco has been working hard to bring their own mesh technology to fruition.

    Will the hardware be upgradeable to the future IEEE 802.11s [wikipedia.org] standard for mesh networks?

    If your really need this then they should buy it, otherwise it may be a better idea to wait.

  • Mesh, Smesh... (Score:2, Informative)

    by SirHailstone ( 901296 )
    Nokia did the same thing a few years ago when they acquired RoofTop Communications. They rolled out the mesh technology to ISPs. After about 10-15 nodes and 2-3 hops away from the master node (or "airhead") the performance was about that of single channel ISDN. It was sold as 1 MBit to each subscriber node. The meshing worked nice. But the speed was pathetic. Then Nokia dumped the entire line without warning and left ISPs high and dry. Many of which I believe went to Motorola's Canopy platform.
    • though I must agree that mesh networks underperform in speed, once they finally institute the ideal of swarming technology, not only will the speed be picked up but you'll also see a drastic increase in potential lost/corrupt packets. the real profit from mesh networking (at least as I see it) is the ability to cut cycles in processes in a networked environment. Once we find that technology like torrents is an easy, fast, and very decentralized way to store and transfer data, mesh networking and hardware te
  • Having messed with current mesh systems (WDS), I'm not very satisfied. The problem that you find is that the radio can only recieve or send at any given moment. Wi-Fi is half-duplex. The effect of this is that every hop you have, you are cutting your available bandwidth by 1/2. Also, reliability goes down the toilet and you add the problem of dumb repeaters circulating packets like highschoolers passing a joint around behind the gym.

    If you were to have a mesh network using up TWO wireless channels, e
  • Is it another Cisco stuff to sell hardware instead of Open source software ?

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