Wifi Revolution

ClearMesh Networks, which offers high capacity mesh WiFi networks for municipalities, recently introduced its new Sentry Mesh solution, which is ideally suited to colleges, shopping malls and other “quasi-public” institutions seeking a wireless alternative to video surveillance.

Using Sentry Mesh, organizations with sprawling facilities can roll out a wireless network providing 100 Mbps of full duplex bandwidth per node to support high-resolution video surveillance and IT applications. The company claims this is one of the only mesh solutions available which can support high-resolution CCTV and IPVS – thus it can help organizations save money because it can be deployed without the need to install expensive coax or fiber cables.

In addition, Sentry Mesh is the only high-bandwidth wireless Ethernet solution to offer integrated Quality of Service (QoS) functionality. The IEEE (News - Alert) 802.11p compliant QoS implementation supports four priority queues and implements strict priority and weighted round-robin queuing algorithms. According to ClearMesh, the solution maintains latency of less than 0.1 millisecond per node.

Sentry Mesh uses the same technology that ClearMesh uses in its Wireless Metro Grid solution for metropolitan deployments – only optimized for smaller networks. It includes the ClearMesh 300 node and the powerful ClearMesh Management System (CMS), which work together to create a resilient (i.e. self-healing) wireless mesh network which can simultaneously support video surveillance, VoIP services, broadband Internet access, WiFi (News - Alert) aggregation and more. In addition to campuses and shopping malls, Sentry Mesh also has applications in industrial parks and port authorities. ClearMesh claims it delivers five times the wireless bandwidth of existing WiFi solutions – yet the price is in-line with competing solutions.

All of ClearMesh’s nodes are linked via a secure, narrow-beam (870 nm) near infrared LED transmitter that “can’t be spoofed or compromised.” Although these nodes require line-of-sight and must be no more than 250 meters apart, they deliver a high degree of reliability, even in poor weather conditions. Best of all, deployment of this technology saves money and time because there’s so much less cabling involved. Backhaul is completely taken care of - as the nodes are full duplex – so organizations can use the upstream for live video surveillance while the downstream is used for Internet, VoIP and other services.

The ClearMesh Management System (CMS) lets the network be managed from a centralized location, either on- or off-site, and also handles diagnostics, service analysis and provisioning.

For more information, visit www.clearmesh.com.

---------

Patrick Barnard is Assignment Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.

Back to WiFi Revolution home