Motorola promotes mesh in wake of London bombings

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[ Feature from openspectrum.info here ]

From "Wireless: Letting technologies grow together," by Victoria Shannon, International Herald Tribune, 17 July:

"After the July 7 explosions in London, some communications networks held up while others creaked under the sudden surge in demand. In the confusion that ensued, the ubiquitous cellphone could not be relied on to calm the fears of many people desperate for information...

"Motorola's solution for keeping channels open, resilient and useful in an emergency would be 'mesh networks,' a way of combining the wireless 'hot spots' that personal computers now tap into with the Internet voice services that companies like Skype are known for.

"The idea of a mesh network is that it links disparate hot spots into a single, expandable broadband wireless network. In fact, Motorola's chief technology officer said on a visit to the company's research center in Paris last week, telecommunications companies would be better served by the idea of combining technologies to fit a situation - like mesh - rather than warring over which single approach to wirelessness will win in the end...

"In London, such a network could have been particularly useful, [said Padmasree Warrior, Motorola's executive vice president and CTO], because of the thousands of so-called Wi-Fi hot spots that have sprung up there over the past several years to serve portable computer users. With a mesh network, 'You can start with nothing and create the coverage as long as you need it,' Warrior said. 'It's self-forming and self-healing.' Many municipal governments are also looking at this technology to offer low-cost Internet access to government services...

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+ Further excerpts:

A handful of small police departments in the United States — in Toledo, Ohio; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Ripon, California — have hired Motorola to enable mesh networks. But trials by emergency services units in New York will probably be the system's biggest so far

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While the first mesh networks are coming out in the United States, Warrior said, Motorola is looking at commercial applications outside North America after the company's purchase last year of a small start-up called MeshNetworks.

Geography, Warrior said, determines the research flow less and less over time. Motorola focuses on the 80 percent of a cellphone's features that will be in demand by most customers and lets the remaining 20 percent get customized by region.

''Full mobility, going between networks — that will be something everyone wants,'' she said. ''More and more, people's needs are the same rather than different. That's one thing that globalization has done.''

+ Read full article: Victoria Shannon | Wireless: Letting technologies grow together | International Herald Tribune | 17 July 2005 | here