Choosing sides: Wi-Fi or EV-DO?

If your company is in Tempe, Ariz., you’re now faced with a decision: should you spend money on metro-area Wi-Fi services or cellular data services such as 1X EVDO?

As with most things wireless, the answer is not simple. You might pay for both, depending on your end users’ requirements and applications.

Yet Wi-Fi providers have been touting lower monthly fees and higher bandwidth compared with cellular providers for services such as Internet access, VPN connections to corporate networks and VoIP calls. Those services are being marketed both to businesses and individual mobile users.

To deliver these services, mesh networks based on the IEEE 802.11 standards are being set up to blanket large areas, such as the Wireless Access Zone Tempe (WAZTempe) network, which was completed just last week by the network operator NeoReach Wireless, a division of MobilePro. Like nearly all such networks, WAZTempe operates in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz radio bands.

The network consists of 550 outdoor, multi-radio access points from Strix Systems. Each access point has two 802.11b/g to connect to client devices, and two 802.11a radios to route the traffic with neighboring access points. At 12 locations, these devices are wired into a newly built fiber Gigabit Ethernet ring, from Cox Communications.

NeoReach authenticates users via 802.1X over an encrypted connection, assigns them to different virtual LANs (VLAN), and can enforce different of QoS depending on what plan a customer has chosen, says Ryan McCaigue[[STET McCaigue]], director of engineering for NeoReach and the man who designed and deployed the Tempe network.

So far, NeoReach and the retail network providers who offer service over the wireless infrastructure have signed up 1,500 subscribers. A key target is businesses, which are offered higher bandwidth, more stringent QoS guarantees, and specialized equipment like high-gain or direction antennas.

Plans start at $29 a month, with bandwidth of up to 384Kbps upstream and up to 1Mbps downstream. By contrast, McCaigue says his own cell phone package costs about $60 a month for voice only, with the option of spending another $40 a month for data services at about 200K to 400Kbps.

Sounds like a no-brainer for network executives, right?

No-brainer no how

Well, no, according to critics.

Market research firm The Yankee Group just issued a report called “Myths and Realities of Wi-Fi Mesh Networking.” The basic conclusion was summed up by co-author Phil Redman. “There is a limit to how far you can push an unlicensed radio technology,” he says. That’s true even as the rapid pace of Wi-Fi innovation, including 802.11n which promises bandwidth of 300M to 400Mbps in 2007, enables providers to push that limit.

But providers such as NeoReach and vendors like Strix, Tropos, BelAir and others point to scores of metro-area deployments around the United States as evidence that Wi-Fi mesh networks are viable.

“If we’re talking about just the technology, then these types of networks designed to cover what I call ‘localized regions,’ with the intention of having a modest level of usage, make sense,” Redman acknowledges.