Bringing the Metro Mesh Indoors

As you probably know, I remain a big fan of metro-scale Wi-Fi deployments, which are going to see great success despite the current slump. An announcement yesterday [1] from key industry player Belair Networks reinforces the role of the metro mesh by bringing the mesh indoors via an indoor .11n mesh AP [2]. This may require a little thought, but, simply put, extending the outdoor mesh to indoor venues simplifies deployments for many facilities like hotels, convention centers, and arenas, and offers new incentives to service providers to deploy metro-area Wi-Fi solutions in the first place. As Belair is only the latest mesh vendor to go the indoor route (a few of their competitors have similar products already), this is clearly an opportunity (it's not quite a trend yet) worth noting.

Think about this: if you run a large public facility, and there's a metro-area Wi-Fi network operating in your area, why not extend it indoors and offer the same services - including metro-area roaming - to your customers and visitors? There's little you have to do to make this work; the service provider will handle planning, configuration, installation, management, and all of that. The biggest issue for me is having a local management console to provision, control and monitor access for your customers, and that should do it. Instant Wi-Fi. A single system. Mesh-based convenience. Everyone goes home happy.

An interesting question remains: could this idea extend to enterprise deployments? Assuming the use of VLANs or similar techniques, and appropriate subnet security, why couldn't enterprise networks in major metro areas go this direction as well? I have a problem with relying on a purely outdoor mesh to provision in-building coverage (it's OK with me if the local motel provides access through guest-room windows, but an enterprise needs a little more physical security than that), but indoor nodes connected to an outdoor mesh just might do the trick.