Posted: 05th Jan, 2005 By: MarkJ
The market advisory firm IDC believes that the MESH (house to house etc.) style of broadband wireless network could soon be offered by mainstream providers. Currently it's mainly used by local community start-ups, especially in remote areas:
Wi-fi has received a tremendous amount of interest in the past couple of years and carriers have started to offer wi-fi hot-spot services at public locations. While there are over 24,000 hot-spots in Europe, wi-fi coverage is still patchy. Because mesh networks are quick and easy to deploy and, more importantly, significantly reduce the need for wiring the backbone, wireless mesh architectures can have a positive impact on extending the reach of wi-fi zones.
European interest in mesh topology for creating large wireless networks has just started to take off and most deployments are still in their early stages. It is now mainly used in metropolitan areas where it serves as either an alternative for broadband services to end users or is used to create local government networks. Only four of the existing mesh networks in Europe provide public wireless access services.
Established hotspot providers haven't publicly announced the usage of mesh for creating large-scale hotspots. However, it is likely that operators have already started to look at this option.We've already seen a number of UK MESH wireless networks fail. Many were hampered by the fast paced spread of ADSL, while others suffered technical problems.
Still, the technology does have a unique place, although getting wider scale networks functioning may prove to be more of a challenge. Source:
http://www.dmeurope.com .