

Tarana Wireless: connecting the last-mile with non-line-of-sight wireless - lisper
http://www.taranawireless.com

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jewel
> Rocket science inside.

This is comical marketing hyperbole. Rockets almost always have line-of-sight,
unless there's an entire planet or moon in its way. They also deal with
distances astronomically larger than a mile.

That being said, I think wireless mesh networks are going to be the best way
to break the cable/DSL duopoly in US suburbs. A properly tuned mesh network
increases its bandwidth as nodes are added. Its setup instructions can
literally be "plug this into the wall on the top floor of your house, then
connect to its wifi network".

Latency might be a problem, but based on previous experience, I imagine that
modern devices are down to less than a millisecond of latency per hop.

~~~
ghshephard
"modern devices are down to less than a millisecond of latency per hop."

Excluding contention, and noise, which can result in missed channel transmit
opportunities, latency on an RF Mesh is a function of the protocol (ALOHA,
Slotted ALOHA etc...), packet size, and transmit speed.

In addition, if you are using the same radio transceiver for transmitting and
receiving, you cut your performance exactly in half.

For a 100 kbit radio @ 256 byte packets, you are looking at approx. 50
msec/hop. It's not that surprising to have a 5 hop network in the field with
about 400 msec latency before you get to the WAN backhaul.

The Tarana stuff looks interesting though - Here's hoping they can pull off
everything they describe on their site.

~~~
sglapa
We most certainly can do what we say.

Check out [http://youtu.be/o_3GUKsQ4CQ](http://youtu.be/o_3GUKsQ4CQ) to see
for yourself.

It's called "Seeing Is Believing" for good reason.

regards,

Steven Glapa (Tarana's marketing guy)

~~~
edwhitesell
190m (623 feet) for this type of connection is not difficult. I was with a
company where we were able to multipath in this fashion in 2001. This was with
off-the-shelf radios and antennas in Part 15 rules (2.4Ghz & 5.8Ghz).

Making multipath work for you doesn't require smart radios/antennas.

Now, if you were doing 400mbit/s, using multipath, with dozens of radios,
hundreds of clients across many square miles...that would be entirely
different. That's a real world scenario. Show me a video of that and I'll be
impressed.

I've been out of the wireless tech for a while, but the only companies I've
heard make claims like this were never able to deliver.

~~~
mino
Hi Steven, good to see myself (as a potential customer) in that video :)

I can attest that the performance were indeed those seen in the video. We are
testing the system these days and, so far, it looks like nothing else we have
seen.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO of a large Wireless ISP.

~~~
sglapa
Great that you're seeing the performance in your testing! Sorry about the
unscheduled video appearance -- unfortunately I didn't have the time to apply
the "blur" brush exactly everywhere. Let me know if you'd like that done and
I'll take care of that for the final version :)

------
zwieback
How is it different from the DIDO stuff we heard about a few years back:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/technology/wireless-
system...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/technology/wireless-system-could-
offer-a-private-fast-lane.html?hpw&rref=technology&_r=1)

[http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf](http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf)

