SkyPilot looks to make citywide Wi-Fi more affordable

SkyPilot has added to its outdoor Wi-Fi mesh offerings with a new mesh node aimed at cutting some of the capital costs of municipal wireless networks.

The vendor also is releasing a new version of its SkyControl network management application that now automatically interfaces with the Google Earth Pro application to map a SkyPilot mesh onto satellite photos.

The new SkyAccess DualBand mesh node is designed to be installed at the edge of a network, with clients connecting via the node’s high-powered 802.11b/g radio in the 2.4GHz band. A single 5.8GHz radio then links SkyAccess to the company’s core mesh node, the SkyExtender, which is almost twice the cost and built to run several backhaul mesh connections at once.

The SkyAccess node, available now, has a list price of $1,800 compared with the existing SkyExtender node, priced at $3,500. A network would consist of edge nodes, formed by the less-expensive SkyAccess devices, and the mesh nodes proper, formed by the SkyExtender devices, to which clients can also connect.

SkyPilot executives estimate the new product can cut deployment costs for its network by up to one-third in some cases.

The new release of SkyControl works with the commercial version of the free Google Earth client application. SkyControl grabs positioning data pulled from the built-in GPS chip in every SkyPilot node. It passes this data to the Google application in a format the application can use. The application uses the data to locate each node’s position on a satellite image.

SkyPilot also has beefed-up quality of service for VoIP by adding new code to its core SyncMesh systems software, which runs on each mesh node. The code supports the Wi-Fi Multimedia specification, which implements several of the traffic-prioritization features in the IEEE 802.11e standard. Traffic now can be sorted into several different dedicated queues, and higher-priority traffic is queued ahead of lower-priority traffic. In addition, latency across the mesh has been reduced.