Q&A: Winner of Silicon Valley's giant Wi-Fi deal isn't fazed by size of net

The company that will provision and run the 1,500 square-mile wireless mesh network in Silicon Valley that was announced this week is an almost unknown, privately held network operator based in Grand Haven, Mich., home of the world's largest musical fountain. Azulstar Networks has been operating in the United States for just three years. Its founder and CEO is a 34-year-old former Intel engineer, Tyler van Houwelingen, who credits a former girlfriend in Spain with coining the company's name ('azul' is Spanish for blue). Grand Haven is van Houwelingen’s hometown and it’s where Azulstar created what it says is the first Wi-Fi mesh net in the United States. In the Silicon Valley deal, Azulstar will operate the network, IBM will be the main integrator and Cisco will provide the equipment. Also in the partnership is SeaKay, a local non-profit advocacy group.

The Silicon Valley network, covering 42 communities, will offer voice, data, and video services to about 2.4 million residents, which is 28 times the combined populations of Grand Haven and Rio Rancho, New Mexico, where Azulstar also runs a Wi-Fi mesh. Van Houwelingen says he anticipates no problems. He spoke this week to Network World's Senior Editor John Cox about the giant deal.

Do you have any experience with large-scale mesh nets?

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The company that will provision and run the 1,500 square-mile wireless mesh network in Silicon Valley that was announced this week is an almost unknown, privately held network operator based in Grand Haven, Mich., home of the world's largest musical fountain. Azulstar Networks has been operating in the United States for just three years. Its founder and CEO is a 34-year-old former Intel engineer, Tyler van Houwelingen, who credits a former girlfriend in Spain with coining the company's name ('azul' is Spanish for blue). Grand Haven is van Houwelingen’s hometown and it’s where Azulstar created what it says is the first Wi-Fi mesh net in the United States. In the Silicon Valley deal, Azulstar will operate the network, IBM will be the main integrator and Cisco will provide the equipment. Also in the partnership is SeaKay, a local non-profit advocacy group.

The Silicon Valley network, covering 42 communities, will offer voice, data, and video services to about 2.4 million residents, which is 28 times the combined populations of Grand Haven and Rio Rancho, New Mexico, where Azulstar also runs a Wi-Fi mesh. Van Houwelingen says he anticipates no problems. He spoke this week to Network World's Senior Editor John Cox about the giant deal.

Click to see: Van Houwelingen

In Grand Haven and Rio Rancho, there are thousands of subscribers and tens of thousands of user of these nets. They've been our alpha and beta tests for our [future] very large regional network deployments, which will use equipment that wasn't available a few years ago.

How big are they?

Grand Haven was the first, blanketed Wi-Fi city, initially covering 7 to 8 square miles. It's been extended to surrounding areas and now covers about 25 square miles. Rio Rancho, with about 70,000 population, is about 50 square miles of coverage.

But the Silicon Valley network is vastly bigger. Will the Cisco equipment scale to that?

The cities on the peninsula are next to each other. And each one [will have] their own bandwidth. We've been testing the Cisco [1500 outdoor mesh access point] for a year.

We'd been wondering where Cisco was in this whole [municipal Wi-Fi] game. Then they arrived with their 1500 platform. There are some [mesh] alternatives that I can take down with just my laptop. Cisco stops a lot that right at the AP. It's really a carrier grade system.

And there's a lot of bandwidth available. You just keep overlaying networks on multiple frequencies. We're supporting multiple [5 GHz] 802.11a nets, as well as the 4.9-GHz licensed band and in the future, the 5.2-GHz licensed band.

We'll deliver as much bandwidth using as many of these frequencies as possible.

I'm not anticipating any problems with the Valley project.

This won't be a single network? Each community will have its own?

In our existing nets, we use today 5 GHz 11a and pre-WiMAX radios. Users access the net on 2.4 GHz, then the traffic jumps up to the 5-GHz band, nearly doubling your capacity. And recently, another 200 MHz of spectrum was added to this band. If you keep overlaying bands, you can bring more and more capacity to each node. Roaming between nodes is all done on the Wi-Fi net, with backhaul on the 11a band. We can just keep overlaying these connections.