City Of Los Angeles Will Test Wireless Broadband

The City of Los Angeles will run a six-month test of wireless broadband in the Marvin Braude Center, a multi-agency facility located in Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley. The trial will use 802.11b mesh network technology provided by wireless Internet services provider Aiirmesh Communications. Aiirmesh announced the project last week.

The goal of the project is to help the City of Los Angeles to better understand Wi-Fi, how it can increase productivity and to analyze the benefits of Internet availability for the public, both inside buildings and in outside common areas.

The City of Los Angeles has said it is contemplating a larger-scale deployment to additional government campuses and other underserved areas in the city.

"As a technological leader, Los Angeles should be on the forefront of providing Wi-Fi internet access," said Los Angeles City Council member Jack Weiss. Weiss authored the proposal for the pilot project.

The deployment at the Braude Center will provide wireless broadband access to a 142,000-square-foot building that houses offices for the city departments of Transportation, Finance and Building and Safety.

The Los Angeles project follows on Aiirmesh's creation of an 8.6-square-mile mesh network to deliver wireless broadband Internet access to the entire city of Cerritos, California, a suburban community of more than 50,000 people southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County. In that deployment Aiirmesh installed 90 Tropos Networks 5110 'ruggedized' 802.11b Wi-Fi outdoor radios, each acting as an access point and a mesh node. Tropos units have a range of as far as a quarter of a mile.

Aiirmesh owns the Cerritos network and charges subscribers for the service, making it a new type of access provider. It offers three levels of service: Traveler, Residential and Business. The Residential service is priced at $29.99 per month on an annual subscription and provides a 500kbps downlink with 250kbps uplink.

Courtesy of Mobile Pipeline