Tropos made a long-awaited announcement. It announced a family of new routers that use two radios instead of one to transmit signals. The move is interesting given the fact that the company has debunked the notion that muni-WiFi networks require multiple radios to better the user experience. But Tropos still argues that it's not efficient to throw radios in a network to better capacity. Instead, software still does most of the heavy lifting. "For any given number of radios, our smart software will provide more capacity than the bridging and grafting wireline routing protocols competitors use," Bert Williams, director of marketing with Tropos, told FierceWireless. The first product, the 5320, offers what the company calls smart routing for multi-band metro-scale wireless mesh networks. One radio in the router operates at the 5 GHz band, where this is more bandwidth but often poor propagation, and the 2.4 GHz band that can be used to link routers together when the 5 GHz band can't be used. The result is cost savings, said the company.
For more about Tropos' new metro-mesh routers:
- check out this article from CNET News.com
- take a look at this release