High Speed Fixed Wireless Internet for Rural Communities

my name is Jamie think I am the co-founder along with my partners here at mimosa we're now a little over four years in business here and we have finally really launched the completeness of our portfolio to really be able to offer a complete suite of different communications delivery platforms and today we wanted to really focus on the latest offering that we have which is our rural solutions for high-speed fixed wireless Internet so before I get started I'll talk a little bit about what we've been doing in the last last year or so so the last the last five six months we've focused on getting our multi-point platform moving forward and for those of you that you know are familiar with the fixed wireless business it's traditionally made up of both backhaul equipment that delivers bandwidth at up from a low cost from data centers and to tower locations into neighborhoods and then of course the all-important multi-point technology and today we're going to be spending a little bit more time working on the multi-point technology but mimosa has really been focused on both backhaul and now multi-point solutions a few months ago we introduced our first series of platforms which actually are going into kind of a groundbreaking area of using fixed wireless to deliver broadband in suburban areas or very high density urban markets today we're really going to talk about going back to the really traditional place where fixed Wireless was born and where there's just been a culture of wireless ISPs or wisps as we call them in the industry really groundbreaking how you can deliver internet to places where cable and DSL just didn't make sense so today and we're going to walk through a bit of that you know in mimosa as I was mentioning I think we're really focusing on four different business cases and applications where broadband is going to get delivered we are going to focus on rural today but just to make sure everybody is aware of the different the different solutions that we are working towards the rural technology as we're going to talk about is really game-changing in the kind of scalability that mimosa can now help deliver into tower locations and rural is traditionally based at towers whether they be more formal cellular towers or the traditional things that wisps like to use for serving locations like grain silos and water towers and hand-built pop locations but really the focus here is going to be how do we get more speed and capacity into rural areas as mentioned a minute ago we also introduced our first suburban technology which is really what we call micro pops that are designed for very short-range high density neighborhoods you can see an example picture here of a wireless isp here in the Bay Area in a high-density market really delivering fiber speeds using fixed wireless at a fraction of the cost we now have a number of people using our technologies in the urban applications which are really multi dwelling units and being able to go from building to building that's probably not our primary focus as a company right now but we see a lot of people doing this with great success and with great cost innovations so you're able to really connect buildings before the fiber guys are able to get there and really provide great services you know in the multi hundreds of megabits up to a gigabit for a building for people that really need better speeds to apartment complexes where fiber doesn't serve and the last area I think we're seeing a huge amount of interest from municipalities and wireless ISPs is the opportunity for is piece to partner with public private organizations so municipalities working together with ISPs to really expand act access options and drive competitive options as well as Wi-Fi for cities and also gaining access for people that really have really poor coverage students in connectivity gaps and other people that are underserved in these higher density markets so this is really the kind of how we bracket the different serving applications and really where we really want to drive the ball forward as a fiber alternative in each of these different markets and really tie them into business art and architectures from a technical perspective but are really easy to understand and easy to deploy so one one thing I'd like to touch on before we get into the actual rural application is the kind of key elements to the architecture for the guys that are familiar with mimosa already you'll probably understand these quite well but it's worth just doing a touch on the name mimosa actually comes from the word MIMO and we named the company this because we were really inspired by this new multiple in multiple out technology that's growing at an incredible pace which helps us get much more capacity out of the spectrum and serve many more users out of that that same amount of spectrum and that's traditionally called MIMO or now it's being called massive MIMO by having many more multiple in multiple out streams and this is kind of the first key tenant the second key tenant for us is when you look at wireless in an outdoor area it typically typically has not worked well because the different clients in the neighborhood couldn't hear each other very well when they can't hear each other they try to talk over each other and that's really the interference that's caused when you have traditional carrier sensing networks much like Wi-Fi uses today and this is where time division or TDM a technology comes into into play where we can organize clients and get much better spectral efficiency than traditional carrier sensing techniques and really make sure that we're going to get the best efficiency out of the air now with that we then are going to be pairing up this technology of TDM a with art really the critical sauce here which is the what we call synchronization or GPS based synchronization where all of the different radios or access points in the neighborhood and on tower locations can use the same GPS synchronization source and reuse the same channel over and over again where traditional I think rural and traditional and now that the new opportunities we're seeing in high density suburban environments didn't always use synchronization that meant that every time you added more base stations or access points you needed to get another channel for that access point and that would cause self interference so the synchronization is helping us eliminate self interference or plan where we can put these radios very tightly together as we're talking more about tower locations and this lets us get incredible spectrum efficiency across a network deployment and lastly is cloud technology which is helping us really understand the behavior as we go on going and maintain these networks for all the different client devices that are out there and how we can analyze what's happening with the health of subscribers and how they may impact when they're when they have problems or for half perhaps if they're trying to optimize take to take up too much bandwidth or if they're not aimed properly as a good example they could cause problems with our overall network and the cloud helps us understand when these situations are happening and how we can help mitigate both spectrum and subscriber use problems that are causing problems with the airtime so these are really the four key tenets that we have - the technology that I want to keep in the back of your mind as we talk about these solutions as we go forward but this is really what mimosa is all about bringing these four things together very cleanly and easily and making it easy to adopt and deploy a network in rural areas but also in the other applications I was mentioning so with that I'm going to jump into the rural opportunity and this is really a very new technical approach all of the past deployed fixed wireless solutions in the field have been traditionally to polarization or to stream MIMO technology and what our new technology as you see pictured here is our product called the a5 cc4 connectorized it allows us to put our connectorized radios up on towers and we're going to show you how this all works in a little bit but it gives us the first 4x4 MIMO technology and that's really just the tip of the iceberg it's the starting point for mimosa as we move into this very high capacity environment on tower locations so we're going to start cutting into the different different parts of the opportunity with rural I'm going to start off a little bit around the the kind of business challenges that happen in in rural I think there's some very good new data that came out of the FCC out of there their typical mapping programs as well as other research that they do but today if you look at the problem we still have 34 million Americans that don't have adequate access and typically that the number for adequate access is I believe getting up towards 25 megabits as they would deem for a broadband connection and that number declines a little bit if you look at people that have slower speeds but you really can't satisfy the speeds that people want and call it broadband with things like satellite so people that have satellite really are now get included in this number because they can't get the kinds of speeds that people want to be able to do Netflix and various different video downloads and interactive Internet of Things kinds of applications with low latencies now looking at it at a global level if you look at generally population-wise over 40% of the global population is in rural areas and the under connect it in the world is quite a large percentage happening in rural areas so it's quite critical that we really develop technologies and a cost basis that's very inexpensive to make this happen so let's look at the business drivers today wisps are challenged on a number of fronts and I want to talk about those those problems and challenges head-on I think that what we see out there today is you have fixed wireless where most people are offering maybe 5 to 10 megabit plans and sometimes a little bit faster but with traditional offers that are out there from the competitors it's very difficult to get to 25 megabits feeds and above now why is this important the FCC last year came out with a new ruling that said that you cannot get called broadband and therefore get access to federal monies to subsidize broadband to help you deploy broadband in underserved areas unless it's called unless it's 25 megabits speeds so this is a really critical thing to upgrade wisp networks and rural areas to get to secondly the CAF 2 funding that's out there from the government for those of you familiar this is obviously a program that will that the government has sponsored to put over nine billion dollars into subsidizing and promoting fixed wireless excuse me fixed technology whether it be Wireless or wired in underserved areas and this is based on where people have where the FCC has been told that there is adequate is adequate or is not adequate bandwidth now this has been an argument point by many as you see a lot of the other major telcos in the space come in and claim that they have bandwidth in certain areas but generally speaking you're never going to get access to this funding unless you start moving to the higher speeds the other things that I think are important here are competition if you look at rural areas and you look at the cellular community the 4G LTE community easily can deliver in rural areas from existing tower locations because they're under their underutilized towers unlike in the city areas where they're heavily over utilized in rural areas they're not so it's quite easy for the LTE community to offer fixed wireless solutions off of their existing 4G based technology and provide competition to what most wisps have been delivering up until now so this in addition to the to the kind of the tier twos that are out there in the incumbent telcos that are going after CAF to funding as well they are also looking at fixed wireless to be able to get after this opportunity as well so I think what if you can sum it up really there really is a very aggressive push by a number of companies to offer services in these areas I wouldn't all consider them adequate to meet the recommendations of the FCC but generally up until now the current technology is delivered by wisps have not always made it up to the levels that would meet these SEC requirements so now let's talk a little bit about the capital expenditure what does it cost to deploy an individual subscriber and this to me is inclusive of you know generalized backhauls backhaul feeding to towers and general equipment needed to be able to cover a broader population from a tower location so this is really averaging across the entire cost of a backhaul plus access plus CPE the customer premise equipment and typically we see today using our mimosa gear this ranges anywhere from around $200 to around $350 per subscriber depending on the capacity you have on the tower now we're actively moving to get this far further as we reduce the cost of our long-range client technologies but this represents a fraction of the costs of getting fiber out into areas which now costs well over $1,000 per subscriber so these are really kind of key business elements that we look at so now what I want to touch on really is kind of the the key architecture techniques looking at how do we build out a rural rural solution so as I was mentioning rural starts with delivering bandwidth into these serving locations which are typically towers these are really in the past have been typically under unlicensed point-to-point backhaul links a lot of people have used five gigahertz for this and this is something that mimosa has been delivering I think fantastic quality products in for the last year and a half but there's also a big trend now as wireless ISPs are going up in speed and wanting to improve their long-term reliability and resilience to interference and also make space in the spectrum for multi-point they're moving towards license technology and that can be the 11 gigahertz and licensed part 101 in the United States but also higher frequencies in people are moving even up to 660 gigahertz and 70 get hurt products for shorter range technologies but generally speaking there's going to be a mixture of backhaul of course feeding towers I'm only showing run one radio here but typically we're seeing redundancy built in or multiple paths getting to the tower as well as being a very strong trend so from that point I'm not showing all the details here but interconnecting typically to a switch at the bottom of the tower then comes the access points connected up to sectors then these sectors typically are what we've seen statistically is about I would say about five years ago our wireless IP partners were roughly seven to eight miles on average away from there so their typical subscribers in rural areas the last last three years of progression since then our wireless IP partners are now telling us now they're really between three to five miles from their subscribers in rural areas which means they've been putting a concerted effort of getting closer to those subscribers to provide more serving points to get more capacity and more speed to the subscriber so typically what we see on average in the deployments and and all of the testing that we've done really we see people in the about 30 subscribers per sector up to about 50 subscribers per sector and I think that's a pretty a pretty good target and this is about where we've set our our quality metrics and our business case is around that 30 subscriber limit but you can go higher than that I think that's going to be important to go higher than that in developing markets as well where they're much more cost sensitive and you're going to want to divide through the economics of an access point or a serving location by more drivers so now the question is okay I have more subscribers than that and in different directions on the tower how am I going to do this well of course I'm going to want to add in more sectors and this is where our synchronization technology comes in so looking kind of it from an eagle eye view down you have a number of different access points now pointed in different directions this is going to be very basic for most of the wisps that are here so bear with me we'll get to the meat of some of the tech in a little bit but effectively I can now put back-to-back sectors with able to reuse the exact same channel and that's of course important because the spectrum that we have is quite limited so we want to be able to take a channel and not not use that channel only once on the tower we want to be able to use it at least twice and if we get tighter and tighter beam widths as there's a bunch of new antenna technologies coming out that have incredible isolation on them we'd be able to actually reuse that bandwidth even more so than then twice on a tower so this is a really great increase of spectral capacity and number of subscribers that can be affected here at this point as a result okay so let's dig into the details a little bit I'm going to start off with the a 5c product the AAA standing for our access products five standing for five gigahertz and C standing for connectorized in our naming acronym the a 5c is just actually hit the market our first users started receiving them about two weeks ago for general production we have been testing it in the field for obviously over five to six months at least with our beta partners and it's been a real game-changer in a lot of different ways and we're going to talk through the different pieces of technology that that come along with this but I can generally tell you that that we have a lot of people that are going to want to target very long range clients for you know we've heard people asking for up to 20 miles and this is going to be the access point that we'll be able to do that and it will be able to handle distances that are very short as well now we are typically do not recommend extreme short and extreme long together that's usually not a good thing for access points that's also why we've seen a lot of wireless ISPs get closer and closer to their subscribers so that they have a more general density of subscribers in the same area but generally speaking this is the product that we're going to recommend for really anything more than one to two miles and we have other products that will work very very well on those shorter look distances for the urban the urban and suburban cases but this is really where you want to go from tower serving locations so we can get you to the spec sheet so I'm not going to go too much into detail on this slide I'm going to go into the different features and benefits of these as we go through this as we go forward here um so first and foremost the things that we always do in our products is we make them very very rugged and really you know telco grade especially to deal with outdoor considerations so the a 5c is ip67 rated it also comes with gas discharge tubes what does that mean it's electrostatic discharge protection on the Ethernet ports this isn't a powered over Ethernet product so we want to provide the best possible protection up on tower locations that are constantly seeing static and ESD discharge and also extend a temperature performance so we've really done a great job of making this a product that will have a very long life you'll notice kind of the effort that we've put into for heat dissipation and all the things that we're going to deal with in incredibly high temperature environments and low temperature environments as well so this is I think something that any wisp is going to enjoy that we've really designed this for a very long life of a product where I think there's a lot of lower cost stuff in the space that just doesn't take into consideration the long-term impact on components and heat and things like that I think the biggest benefit that you're going to realize is is in addition to capacity is what we call beamforming and most people that are familiar with wireless are just now getting familiar with what beamforming does with these four antennas that are built in to the in streams that are built into the a5 see we are now using a new technology that that literally lets us aim the radiation patterns in thousands of different combinations of directions and what that lets us do is when we know the location of a client it's going to let us of course aim that aim towards that client but the big benefit to that is that the focusing of that energy and the process of these streams now gives us an extra three DB of signal which in the wireless world is fifty percent stronger than before so this is a huge advantage to basically being able to control the radiation patterns from one perspective and get increased signal as well the the other element that I think is fantastic about this as you'll notice we're now able to create these finger-like beams that allow us to push the beam in a very specific direction and the clients are literally telling us at their home locations what the best location from from a wireless RF perspective is to aim back towards the mat and that's a big deal for us to be able to reduce unwanted radiation in certain directions that's important both from the health of the air and trying to keep as little radiation where you don't need it but also for the final concept here which is the concept of being able to have multiple different clients being able to be transmitted to at the same time this is what we call multi-user mimo so our antenna technology is completely passive what do I mean by that you don't need any specialized antenna technology to with any kinds of beam steering there used to be technologies that required that this beamforming technology simply takes four antennas of strips that are inside these enclosures and we'll show you some pictures of them a little bit that and simply put this is a digital way for us to be able to control the four different streams in different directions amplitude and modulation and this is what's giving us the phase shifting that we need to be able to aim these patterns so this is going to allow us to create nulls in one direction so that we can start shooting streams of my most streams and bandwidth in other directions from the same access point and that's a really critical concept from a spectrum reuse perspective I'm able to get more bandwidth in the downstream direction is part of this inherent design so synchronization I think is is really not very well understood by a lot of folks this is a great example of one of our clients in the field using in a rural situation our GPS sync technology and this this one allowed us to be in this particular one happened to use be using our backhaul getting us four different directions using the same channel in our backhaul and this is really a critical concept as I was mentioning for tower capacity so as we are trying to put more subscribers on we don't want to be taking up a channel with every access point that's put on and this is you know a unique technology that's combined with our MIMO technology now to really deliver the best possible speed performance and spectral reuse and a network-wide and the end a tower wide facility so I think this is a really critical concept to really understand and you know really fundamentally it's a in the access point world or the multi-point world it's really for back to back synchronization so you what we're doing here is making sure that the antennas are designed with good enough quality from front to back ratio that they won't interfere with the radiation of the app the access point on the other side of the tower and we also are of course using the TDMA and GPS synchronization technology we also get asked a lot about what happens if we don't get we may not be able to get GPS or not as good of a GPS lock we do only need three satellites to get a lock but we've also put in the GN s GNSS or GLONASS technology which doubles the number of satellites that are in the constellation in the sky for us to be able to get derive our critical timing for so we've had very very good success with this we've made it super easy by building the GPS into every radio on the tower locations so you don't need to have an external dongle to receive signal we've I think had very very good success with this approach it keeps it easier and it also keeps keeps birds from chipping away at cables and things like that that might cause problems as they look like attractive little cables up on the tower the birds like to eat okay so looking at antennas I'd like to introduce a couple of different antennas we get a lot of questions about antennas because this is a new technology this is the first 4x4 antennas for the five gigahertz wireless space for fixed wireless so we decided to partner with well-known very high quality antenna partners the first one that we did so with was KP performance and 10 is based out of Canada and they built the first 4x4 antenna designed around the very specific design criteria that we had to make synchronization and collocation work really really well so their first product on the market is now available and it is I think kind of the top end of the market from a performance perspective we have a number of different antennas which are going through our final qualifications and moving their way into the distribution channel the first one that you'll also see on the channel is also from a company called MTI edge mt i will also have a 65 degree antenna coming to market very soon it's much more of a cost-effective play and has very very good characteristics for synchronization as well that we've also tested so we are getting in the habit of doing now qualification of recommend of antennas that we will recommend recommend and you will soon see a site launched by us around doing much broader recommendations around products that work really well with the most gear the KP product comes with an integrated mounting bracket to make it easy as well to mount up the a5 so the configuration I was mentioning earlier so the first one the this x4 antenna from KP is a 65 degree antenna as they rate it which really realistically means if you really wanted 360 degrees of coverage you would want to put up to six of these on a tower so really that could represent at very high speeds capacities somewhere in the range of you know 250 to 300 clients of really high performance and you know now you're talking about you know 100 Meg plus speeds for people around those kinds of capacities so this would be an ABC configuration as we call it where you would have three different channels channels being used across the spectrum and then back to back we're utilizing on GPS synchronization KP also did introduce for space-saving needs for capacity a new product called the x8 the x8 is coming to production it's not quite on market yet but it is it is coming very soon this lets us mount to act a five Cs to the antenna and leverage basically the state space savings a lot of towers as most wisps are aware have to pay for the space for each antenna this allows you to double down the number of antennas connected up to excuse me the number of radios connected the antenna that's I think a key thing for people that are trying to add super capacity so if you're if you want to run multiple channels so I can now run multiple channels in the same sector and get twice the capacity on different channels so this is a really keen way of really upping capacity on towers beyond the single X for antennas being GPS synchronized um so similarly this is exactly what this would look like so you would easily be able to put up these twelve access points it's probably a little a little bit more than some wisps or wanting to spend on a tower of course but for guys that really are going after high capacity tower serving locations and also multiple channels in a particular sector for client diversity I think this is a really interesting solution so moving into the client side so getting beyond probably about three miles three four miles range the c5 product as as some are familiar with is the first Cephas first product that we came out with that was an integrated antenna I'll show you some pictures of that in a moment but that distance isn't necessarily long enough for rural applications that are going out to these longer distances out beyond five kilometers or so so we created the first product for long range called the c5 see unfortunately this product is not yet ready for market we're looking at that you know closer to the end of the year but generally speaking this will be allow you to bring your own antenna this would allow you to connect up virtually any parabolic antenna or various types of reflector or or panel antennas we are working with antenna manufacturers to come out with some very very cost aggressive options to keep this as a lower cost performing client device um we know there's big demand for 25 DB I plus plus antenna solutions that are low cost so we were actively working towards that to really keep the cost down on the client side but effectively will will give you the the capability to do that now in the meantime as people are deploying over the next couple of months and this product may not be available yet we have a lot of people still using their existing clients in the field I think this is a critical feature of the platform is the compatibility with legacy 802 11 n based equipment from third parties so if you've already deployed rural equipment using 11 n based technology you can put it in compatibility mode with the access with the a 5c and use those at very long distance so we recently put out software that fully supports that so I can now do very very long distance using in the field 11 n gear and if it supports true based true Wi-Fi based 11 AC we can also support that in the short term transition to be able to handle long client long range clients so there is a solution in the near term and those products become into market soon after that so we also have worked towards on all of our products where we could supporting public safety applications in additionally here we are pushing the for the a 5c and our client products towards the certifications to support public safety four point nine four two four point nine nine banned this is a critical banned for municipalities and safety organizations so I don't want to dwell too much on this but it's important to know that we put the effort here into supporting these so when we go into these public-private environments where we're trying to support critical life-saving applications and safety applications that we can get dedicated spectrum for those and that is actually supported directly in the radio as is all you need to do is register to use these licenses in your account with us on our cloud system and you'll get access to those frequencies assuming that you have a proper application and an FCC license to do that as a public safety agency a couple other things that we've included on we we get we get some really great reviews on this feature is the ability to we've put in the 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi purely for the purpose of getting easy access up to an access point from the ground and this is so if I want to be able to make some configuration changes and/or I need to adjust heading directions on things it's very easy for me to use my smartphone to talk directly up to the device so this is really an ease of use feature we have some wisps that prefer not to have that on is that something that you'll be able to turn off if necessary but it's something that a lot of ISPs have really started to like because you know the ease of ease of use of having a single-handed smartphone being able to get information for the device is really nice at the top of a tower okay so I'm going to transition a little bit to talking more about kind of what it's like to install a home in in a subscriber environment and so what I'm showing here is kind of the ecosystem of different pieces of the equation that you need to think about when going after a mimosa solution on the access side so to here I'm showing a number of different products that go together to be able to make the installation easier so starting at the top we have the client radio which would either be the c5 or that connectorized c5 C product that I mentioned earlier and that would be then attached to a mount our favorite mount that we use is the what we call the flexi mount the flexi mount as you can see here can attach to siding but it also has attachments to poles if you need to attach to a pole on the roof and it can work at ver at any angle so it's quite flexible to be able to be put on angled roofs angled surfaces vertical or horizontal poles or even angled poles is really the most flexible mounting solution on the market out there at a very low cost and then also critical to every installation we recommend for grounding purposes and for protecting the inside of the home putting in what we call a mid or a network interface device and this will help to provide ESD protection or so that lightning for example if for any chance that the radio got hit by a lightning strike there would be no risk or liability to you that there was anything any power or surge brought into the home and this is a very low cost item to be able to add on and it is within you know the right approach with the regional and national electric codes to go do this and of course you know per electric code you would go straight to ground as well a lot of wisps don't like doing this but it's what would be suggested as following the right codes you can also of course run a wire directly to the utility entry point of the home which is also grounded whether that's the the plumbing and electrical area of where that enters the house now on the inside of the house we've also developed a product that we're very proud of that is really clean solution for delivering a managed Wi-Fi solution for in-home and this is what we call the g2 product this is designed to both power the device on the outside of the house but also provide integrated Wi-Fi for the consumer on the inside of the home now the cool features with this really are that it's simple clean it's not multiple devices but most importantly it has built in a complete health diagnostic to determine the difference between the constant problems that people have with Wi-Fi inside of their homes and detecting the difference between a problem with the network so in in capabilities here we are constantly checking the network health from this device and reporting back to the wireless ISP and notifying them when we're seeing really bad behavior performance and also we're able to have the ISP come in and look to the inside of the house at the signal levels for particular devices so - so customer calls with problems with their network you're able to tell if it's a network problem or if it's a Wi-Fi problem and then help them understand with specific devices that have specific signal level problems and also recommend putting repeaters into the house and you can put multiple of these devices distributed around the house and help them place those devices very easily so now we're really embracing helping the subscriber understand the true health of their internet and their perspective is if Wi-Fi doesn't work internet doesn't work and that's now becoming the responsibility of a good operator to help them get better Wi-Fi so they don't think that your service provider service is very poor okay um with that I'm going to jump a little bit into the last client device on which is the c5 device and again we're recommending this only up to roughly five kilometer ranges because it is only eight 20db iDevice so we see this is more critical in the suburban applications we will see people using this with the a 5c product in you know probably less debt less less rural rural areas I should say but this is really kind of the mainstream client for short range and is a kind of a very simple reflector based design so you'll see it's a very clean and easy design roughly speaking it's about the third of the size of a typical satellite dish so it's quite quite compact so these are kind of the entire pieces of the ecosystem that we have so I think so far what we've really touched on is all of the kind of the business drivers to what's happening in the rural community with both subscriber need the business opportunity and the the capabilities that wisps have today we've talked a little bit about the new technologies entering the space to be used at tower and sector locations we didn't talk too much about backhaul because we spent so much time you typically talking about backhaul then we talked a little bit about the subscriber technology and what it takes to install this stuff on a house so hopefully I'm sure that Lee has a number of questions lined up here hopefully this has inspired a few questions to come forward and we'll do our best given the time to be able to answer as many of these as possible first question here is around the beam width of typical sectors for the i5c so I think that what we're seeing statistically and we put up a bunch of poles on our community to kind of see what people are asking for and needing and also we had asked the antenna manufacturers regionally because it is quite different in the Midwest versus the south and the West what are they sell best in each different areas and the answer that came back was that 65 degrees is really the kind of go to initial choice and as wisps have been running out of spectrum they've been getting narrower narrower and narrower or a narrower in their beam widths on the and the antennas now I think that because we're in providing more capacity at the radio and GPS synchronization it does allow us to get more subscribers onto these these access points I think some people have been comfortable putting on them in the past so I think that some people have been moving down to 30-degree antennas but I think that's a little bit overkill so I think the sweet spot is 65 to start with in kind of good density markets and then for very for much lower density markets we're definitely seeing the need for 120 degrees and of course the the old school traditional 90 degrees so you will actually see a number of different offerings coming out I think over the next two months 420 degree and 90 degree options from our antenna partners but 65 degrees is really the the first two or three antennas we have coming out or targeting that size next question is around JPS synchronization and that working between APs and backhaul radios great question so today we started off with a GPS synchronization timing window for those of you familiar with it we we are deciding basically how much how much speed do we want to provide in the upstream and the downstream direction so in our backhaul radios we introduced the concepts of 50 50 or 50 percent upstream and fifty percent downstream and then also the 75 25 as we called it which meant 75 percent down 25 percent up and vice versa 25 75 up down in the access points we aimed to start with a initially with a 50 50 so the a 5 C will be compatible with the mimosa backhaul 50-50 configuration at the 8 millisecond time windows so these are the larger time windows right now over time we will be introducing smaller time windows and I think that we will be optimizing as well to go towards in that 70 75 70 75 percent range up down as well so this is something that we're going to be working on to continue to add more compatibility feature modes but 50 58 milliseconds will be the first compatibility point next question is around the j2 and how that could be used to cover a larger home so the g2 as as you noted from the name too is a 2 gigahertz product so that is inherently using the 2.4 gigahertz band which does give a bit better coverage but as many people would note has a little bit more noise because it goes farther and you might be picking up your neighbors noise floor as an interference so generally speaking what we've done here is we've built up a very high performance antenna although it looks very small and compact is a very strong antenna and a nice power output um now what we're what we've built here is the ability for you to measure the signal level of a client in the home whether you're on the phone talking to a customer when they're home complaining about Johnny's phone in his bedroom isn't working well you can tell them to go in there with that and you can remotely monitor it and say yes we need you to put an access point or a repeater oh gee another g2 device directly in you know somewhere in between those two points and that would be your service point so how do you do that how do you connect between them well we've made the g2 s very easy to simply plug and play a second or third one where you literally plug it in and it zaps the configuration of the original one and copies it on to the repeater device and then you simply place that device in the other part of the house very very simple and great that we've also kept the cost of this product quite low we introduced that product at $49 so we've tried to keep this very aggressive and very feature-rich from the ISPs perspective being I'll help the subscriber and monitor their connections a question here about our experience with the i5 and beta testing in relation to foliage and the ability to penetrate foliage great question um foliage as most people will know and and you know granted we're talking about rural here and we're talking about five gigahertz a lot of people in the rural space are leaning towards for heavy foliage environments LTE bands and 2.5 gigahertz to be able to get a little bit better better penetration that being said though with the beamforming that we've been getting on these antennas and our experience with in general has been that we've seen very good signal increase on a lot of the places that are that you're familiar with already deploying in we've been getting much better as an AR so I think that there is improvement here but I don't want to be telling you that this is a major game changer for foliage you're not going to be blowing through Therese you're gonna definitely be able to make it through you know some leafy leafy areas but at some point if you're not close enough to get enough power through those you're going to struggle so I would say you know expect it to do equally or better but don't expect it to be orders of magnitude better in 5 gigahertz than you're used to ok that's all we have time for thank you everybody for taking the time today really appreciate you taking a chunk of your time out of your day to come and listen to us thank you to Jamie for joining us and presenting and look out for more of these to-the-point webinars in the future thank you thanks everybody

Channel: Mimosa Networks

Views: 153,740

Keywords: Wireless, Rural, Connectivity, Internet, Broadband

Id: kr6ouHl6ySo

Length: 42min 54sec (2574 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2016