To: rascalbythesea who wrote (42078 ) 6/16/2004 3:50:23 PM From: Greg h2o Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 42804 interesting...in attempting find info on alvarion, i found the following article, which is the first time i've seen so much detail on national broadband. Interesting that they are using telco servers from IBM. Anyone aware of a company that might provide remote management consoles for servers? ----------------------------------------------------------- National Broadband plans to provide a nation-wide wireless network along WilTel’s Fiber Routes nationwide, rolling out wireless broadband services to communities along the fiber network footprint. Riding on two dedicated fibers of the Wiltel network, National Broadband will use both licensed and unlicensed spectrum, deploying a master base station at each of 422 optical regeneration stations, located at 40 mile intervals along the nationwide WilTel fiber network. At each of the stations, National Broadband will install a customized optical switch from MRV Communications that is capable of adding/dropping up to 1 Gbps of traffic onto the network. National Broadband uses point-to-point radios to serve regional ISPs, cable companies, independent telcos and large businesses. It also plans to offer point-to-multipoint residential services in some areas. Their network is utilizing a new generation of “content processors” from Tarari (an Intel spin-out), along with telco servers from IBM, and .NET capabile, Microsoft 2003 Servers. The network will have over 1 petabyte of local storage capacity at start-up. The Tarari processors offload computationally intense security and media functionality from end-user devices. The .NET functionality will support forthcoming media and presence applications from Microsoft and others. Other "city cloud" competitors include: Boingo, CoMeta, Verizon and T-Mobile all have grand plans to enter the hot spot space. Vivato's outdoor Wi-Fi switch delivers 1 Mbps to ordinary Wi-Fi clients in PDAs and laptops, a mile or more away. (Daily Wireless tested Vivato's City Cloud this June). Tropos, near San Francisco, intends to target municipal users like police and fire departments. They have deployed a mesh system where only some of the hot spots have land-line connections, the rest use mesh-like interconnections. Other turnkey systems include: Alvarion and Pronto's hotspot gateway Colubris and Juniper Fatport's Community gateway PCTEL's Software Access Point Proxim Net Manager Soekris Community gateway Sputnick Community gateway Toshiba's Community gateway Towerstream and Aperto ValuePoint Network's HG-2000 hotspot gateway Vernier Networks Wireless Utility Pole Systems