Wireless Technology: Waverider

One of the biggest problems with wireless is line of sight. Without line of sight you can pretty much forget 2.4Ghz wireless. Trees, especially, kill the signal. Just a small patch of trees can seriously degrade or even fully stop 2.4Ghz wireless broadband. Line of sight is one thing that we don't have in the Broadlands, and unfortunately trees and hills is something that we have plenty of.

Enter Waverider, on 902 MHz.

Why does a 902 MHz product give superior range?

The reason that 902 MHz technology gives superior NLOS range (NON line of sight) is not as simple to understand as we would all like. There are a number of factors:
1. Less free space loss
2. Less vegetation loss
3. Less loss through building materials, glass
4. Less energy loss through reflections off of neighboring buildings, land, etc (more energy gets to the target)
5. Less energy loss through diffractions (more energy bends around obstructions like hills, buildings and trees to get to the target
6. Less cable loss
7. Excellent transmission power and receive sensitivity in the WaveRider radio.
8. WaveRider’s switched-phase diversity antenna technology


How fast is it?

What is the typical speed per user?

Many factors affect the speed that a typical user will see, including backhaul, shared uplink capacity and utilization, the number of EUMs sharing any particular base station, the activity of the other users on the network, the type of equipment the user has attached, and the Internet speed upstream from the LMS4000 equipment.

Most Internet traffic is quite bursty. Any one user is typically busy for short bursts of time separated by long periods of no activity. For bursty Internet access, such as web browsing, the typical Internet download speed should be in the range of 500 to 750 kbps. The maximum speed is 2 Mbps. The Grade of Service control in the EUM3000 polling MAC will limit users to some speed less than 2 Mbps, typically between 0 kbps and 2000 kbps.

What's the drawback?

1. It's expensive to deploy. $500-550 per user for equipment. But then again, it's almost the same price as the YDI EtherAnt-II.

You can read more about Waverider at:

http://www.waverider.com

John