Meshed WiMax - Yeah Baby!

I just found the wireless broadband equipment of my dreams. SkyPilot Networks has announced they are working on a product line that combines the high throughput and long range of WiMax, with the scalability, fault tolerance and load balancing of a mesh network topology.

In an interview with Wi-FiPlanet.com, Brian Jenkins, vice president of product managment at SkyPilot, said

"...traditional point-to-multipoint (P2MP) WiMax, using base stations broadcasting to multiple customer premises units (CPEs), has "limited scalability -- mesh is the exact opposite. There's no base station, but lots of smaller deployments with limited range. However, they have multiple hops and redundancy."

Redundancy? Subcriber nodes can connect to multiple gateway nodes. You want to do Wireless VoIP? No problem - put your phones on a dedicated VLAN; dedicate bandwidth with traffic shaping; and prioritize the packets. You say you're not in line of site? OFDM modulation (multipath), high power (boring through trees) and routing (mesh) will probably get you connected.

The 2010 Jamboree might be a perfect match for this little bit of networking nirvana.