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The Meshbox goes carrier grade: faster ... dual radio WiFi auto-net

Nearly ready for launch is a new, uprated Mesh-box, which creates a WiFi network with any other visible Mesh boxes. But this one is much faster, with two radio modules! - and it will appeal to phone companies serving remote areas with broadband.

The Meshbox is a simple PC fitted with WiFi, and smart software to make it search out and find any other Meshboxes, with which it creates a neighbourhood network. So why would you want a Meshbox with two radios? Summarised, it gives it more capacity, and is much easier to configure on a large scale, too

First, it would be a lot faster than an ordinary Meshbox, because the link "out" can be a different one from the link coming back in. But the question that is maybe less obvious is: who would actually want a Mesh to run faster than the standard one?

The answer, according to designer Jon Anderson is "Anybody building big carrier grade meshes supporting more than a thousand users."

And who would be doing that? It's probably a secret until they go public, but there is a customer, in the Caribbean, which is planning to build a rural broadband network using Mesh technology.

The benefit of the dual radio is that you get double bandwidth, reduced contention. There's "some very clever stuff with cell organisation," says Anderson. Each box picks 2 out of 3 random frequencies from the 11 American channels (13 in Europe) and always makes sure that one of them will be the same as any nearby box.

"So one box has A+B channel another B+C another C+A - and the routing goes A to B to C back to A" Anderson explained, "and they are auto-configuring so that channel A doesn't interfere with B and B doesn't interfere with C."

It vastly expands the mesh capacity, he says. "When you have lots of traffic on a one-radio mesh, it's stop and go. One radio with unicast has to wait, store and forward each packet. Double it up and you get a good performance increase, and a much bigger mesh is possible."

The new Meshbox X2 may be called the Mexhbox or something cool. It will cost £500 - twice the price of the single-radio Meshbox, which is really very aggressively priced - a complete low-power, compact Linux PC with built-in wireless - because LocustWorld believes it will be popular with corporate network builders.

As well as the project in the Caribbean, several American companies have contacted NewsWireless.Net to say they are considering networking their offices with Meshboxes, because it's so much easier than the standard system of doing a site survey and running ethernet all over the place.

The new Meshbox X2 will make the job of configuring the network even simpler, allowing network managers to re-configure the network simply by putting a new Meshbox in any area where the signal is weak, or capacity inadequate.

The Mesh will reconfigure itself automatically to ensure no interference.

Pictures of the new box are shown above - well, they aren't exciting pictures! - but they do show just how simple it is. Oh, and they show the cool new blue LED power monitor, too ...

And you can see the whole set at on the Locustworld web site here.