| Oulu City To Get City-wide Mesh Network |
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| By Sharat Khungar | ||||||
| Thursday, 15 March 2007 | ||||||
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Overall, Oulu is committed to adding around 210 extra access points to the network — known as panOULU — by the end of 2007. About 60 of these also provide outdoor coverage. Of these outdoor nodes, 11 currently include mobile-access points on buses, a ferry and a mobile library. Additional outdoor access points cover a large range of municipal service points, including in the city’s libraries, schools, health centres, hospitals, sports facilities, theatre, city hall, youth and culture centres, and elderly centres. The wireless network, panOULU, provides open and free wireless (WiFi) Internet access to the general public and an established business plan for panOULU subscriptions enabling organizations to provide its own open panOULU visitor network to customers and guests on their premises. Mesh networks are made up of individual mesh nodes, which have the ability to automatically form connections with other nodes within range, and reroute traffic if a node drops offline. This makes the networks self-organising. Strix Systems claims that its mesh-networking products can support up to 768 users per node with throughput of around 35Mbps (megabits per second). The company recently received an undisclosed, but what it claims was significant, investment from Korean hardware maker Samsung, which is heavily pushing research and development in WiMax. WiMax — especially mobile WiMax, or 802.16e — is widely seen as the next step for wireless technology, but the mobile standard is yet to be ratified. However, companies such as Intel and Motorola are already investing heavily in mobile chipsets to take advantage of the technology when it gains more momentum.
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