Having proven its mettle in the backhaul market, Mimosa is ready to roll with its new Micro Point-of-Presence (MicroPoP) network architecture, designed to enable service providers to deliver gigabit wireless broadband in densely populated urban and suburban areas.
 |
|
Mimosa A5 access |
Previously, fixed wireless thrived in remote or rural areas. Now it's providing faster speeds and much better economies of scale to deliver broadband in high-density, competitive wired markets. "For us, this is a really big deal" to see the technology pieces coming together and getting good market validation with the ISPs that have deployed it so far, according to Jaime Fink, co-founder and chief product officer at Mimosa.
"It's the first time fixed wireless has kind of gotten dense," and really the first time wireless is a truly viable option to fiber from a speed and cost perspective, he told FierceWirelessTech.
The core of Mimosa's MicroPoP solution, the Mimosa A5 access point, with quad-sector antennas and massive MIMO technology, delivers what the company describes as industry-leading performance for high density short-range multipoint broadband applications. Deployed in a central point within a neighborhood, the A5 access point provides wireless broadband connections to subscribers within 500 meters and features GPS sync-enabled time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol; that ensures each client device precisely receives and transmits under the timing control of the access point, and eliminates the possibility of interference from neighboring A5 access points.
While U.S. operators are thoroughly invested in high-band spectrum and seeing what it will do for them for 5G, Fink said Mimosa is of the mind that high-band spectrum is not always the answer. Instead of taking big swaths at higher bands, it makes sense to take smaller amounts of what he considers better lower spectrum for dealing with the kinds of problems you run into in urban and city environments and serving that "last mile" or 1,000 meters.
"We want to make sure we can have very good reliability and penetrate through trees and bushes and things that are a reality in broadband environments in neighborhoods, so we want to use the lower spectrum to do that and to do that, we have to be incredibly spectrum efficient and scalable," Fink said. "So we think that we're ahead of the game here, as to what 5G's goals are. We're doing it a bit differently, but that's technology that we can do today in the 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum, and there's nothing stopping us from kind of evolving that into other spectrum where it makes sense financially."
Sail Internet, a wireless service provider based in the San Francisco Bay Area, deployed a MicroPoP network in the large suburban community of Fremont that was suffering from poor legacy connectivity. "Mimosa provided us with an exciting opportunity to offer a level of service in suburban areas that was previously impossible," said Kevin Fisher, CEO at Sail Internet, in a press release. "We were able to immediately compete with cable and phone providers in the area, offering dramatically better broadband speeds and network responsiveness."
The Mimosa C5 endpoint client device is Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) capable, meaning that multiple clients on the same access point can be coordinated to simultaneously share spectrum, improving scaling and spectral efficiency. The C5 also features GPS sync-enabled TDMA protocol, ensuring that each client device precisely receives and transmits under the timing control of the access point.
For more:
- see this press release
- see this Light Reading story
Related articles:
Mimosa Networks rolls out B11 for 'Backhaul to the Future'
Mimosa encouraged by Senate support for 10 GHz
Mimosa Networks unwraps super-fast broadband technology