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Carrier Services
ClearMesh Revives FSO – With a Twist
Start-Up Adds Mesh to Wireless Optical Network Scheme
by Jim Barthold
Proving that no idea ever completely goes away and that the
telecom space may be recovered from its nuclear winter,
ClearMesh Networks has jumped onto the scene by reviving
the old concept of using Free Space Optics (FSO) to feed
commercial customers in dense metro areas. To update the
idea, ClearMesh has placed its wireless optics into a mesh
architecture and aimed it at small-medium businesses (SMBs)
with a need for speed and no access to fiber.
The ClearMesh architecture uses nodes with three transceivers
to mesh a metro network with line-of-sight optics using the
850 nanometer band. The company recommends that the
links be no more than 250 meters apart as part of the mesh.
Adding mesh is new and will help connectivity, but the concept
still has the potential to suffer from the dual problems that
have always plagued FSO: maintaining – or even creating --
point-to-point connectivity and driving the signal through fog.
“With point-to-point, anything can obstruct it, (but) now that
there are three transceivers on each node you have the ability
to re-route traffic in another fashion,” said Jason Marcheck,
principal analyst-optical infrastructure, at Current Analysis. “A
lot of the point-to-point issues are being solved by this.”
Weather issues are something else. Light obviously can’t
traverse fog, probably even at 250 meters apart.
“When fog rolls in it can certainly impact the network. That’s
one of the reasons when we deploy networks we limit links to
250 meters,” said Fima Vaisman, senor vice president of
marketing at ClearMesh. “The deployment of this type of
product is really focused on dense metro areas where these
products are going to be deployed within blocks of each other.
Because this is mesh we do have some resiliency.”
In a real pinch and to guarantee service, ClearMesh adds an
RF wireless element to its network for redundancy, a move
that Marcheck said was necessary but questionable.
“Why not just trench the fiber?” he asked. “There are some
arguments to be made against it on that front.”
On the whole, ClearMesh’s goal is to help carriers obviate the
need for trenching fiber. Its network is positioned on a fiber-
fed building that then sends out three signals to three other
buildings that multiple that by three along the mesh, said
Vaisman. Rather than spend about $30,000 to get fiber
service, an SMB could sign up for about $5,000 a month and
get speeds from 5 to 100 megabits.
“Fiber is too expensive; copper can’t really deliver what’s
necessary; DSL is missing business-critical SLAs and doesn’t
really have the upstream bandwidth,” Vaisman said. “The
(ClearMesh) Metro Grid solution enables service providers to
hit these small offices, small businesses, multiple dwelling
units, multiple tenant units, municipal networks and duplicate
fiber to wherever fiber is now.”
The concept has potential, said Marcheck.
“I can see the operator being interested in trialing this,” he
said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see (ClearMesh) come out of
the gate with some trial announcements in the fairly near
future.”
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