On Mar 29, 2012, at 1:58 PM, Josh Baird wrote:

> Anyhow, check the
> video out on ubnt.com for an introduction and technical overview -
> it's worth watching.

The claim is a huge decline in the cost of backhaul bandwidth for wisps between 
10 and 100 times.  I have just finished the preparation of an extensive article 
on a nebraska wisp whose network is backhaul radios on towers about 5 miles 
apart.  he is on over 100 towers across a space of 150 miles by roughly 40 miles

here is the text of the video which indeed is very good

Robert Pera, CEO Ubiquity:  Ubiquity had a lot of strength.   We had hardware 
design software design, mechanical design, antenna design.   We had  firmware 
and protocol design but the one thing that we were missing  was really our own 
radio design at our old modem design.

Engineer 1:  The group of guys who are here have been working together for 
about 20 years.   we collectively have a lot of experience in the wireless data 
world -  probably more so than any other company. This team of people 
originally were all hired into Motorola,  some of us go back to  the late 
1980s. We actually worked on a program called altair.  Altair was one of the 
1st attempts at doing in building wireless networking. It was  the 1st wireless 
local area network product ever.   It was actually the 1st time that I am aware 
of that anyone had actually built a broadband wireless networking product.

What we did on altair continued on through Motorola and  eventually became a 
product called  canopy.   Canopy is a very popular product now. It is a 
wireless Internet distribution system  used to provide high-speed Internet 
people in houses where there typically is no access to cable or to DSL 

Gary Schulz:  we had kind of run the canopy product through its maturity and 
did not see a lot of additional room for growth there.  When the ubiquity 
management approached us, we were looking for the opportunity to continue to 
build new stuff and that's what made it very interesting to come over and work 
for Ubiquity  Because their focus is on the new stuff. It is on working on high 
speed and low cost.

The freedom to design at our level was just go and do it. What are you going to 
do?  it was like start with a clean sheet of paper.  start with nothing. We 
could build and design this product in any way we saw fit.   The idea was just 
to be the best we could.
air fiber is the start of the new product line within Ubiquity. It is the 1st 
of several products  that are highly efficient, high data rate,  wireless 
broadband products.

Greg Bedian:   Our design is something that is a little bit crazy. We are  
trying  to build a 0 IF radio at 24 GHz and do this for a 100 MHz bandwidth 
which  is something that I am not sure anyone else has been crazy enough to try.

Chuck Macenski:  As fast as you can send a packet on an ethernet wire we can 
receive it and transmit with no limitations.

Air fiber is designed to be mounted in a reasonably high location.  It is a 
point to point network where the 2 antennas see each other.  this is a system 
that under certain circumstances can work up to 10 miles.  It is going to be 
very easy to deploy and align.   It is a product that is going to require only 
one person to carry it up the tower and install it.   There is a display on the 
bottom that tells you what sort of power is being received as well as a very 
comprehensive web interface.

We designed all aspects of it. The modem, the radio,  the mechanical housing. 
This is a completely designed from scratch, purpose built solution just to 
deliver backhaul.  So it is not based on wi-fi or anybody else's standards.  As 
a result it does not suffer from any of the other overhead normally associated 
with that.

Built for speed -- if you want to compare the data rates of existing products 
to our product, other products on the market today would give you the expected 
data rate of the flow of water through a garden hose.   Our product will 
provide the flow rate of a firehose. This product will provide 1.4 Gb per 
second of data flow which is 300 times faster than you would normally be able 
to get from your own home Internet service provider.

Operators will be able to get  10 to 100 times more data throughput for the 
same dollar.   That is the big impact that this product is going to have.

Rick Keniuk:  we looked at 24 GHz.  We actually wanted to do something up in 
high frequency and that happens to be the next unlicensed band beyond six 
gigahertz.  You can put it out anywhere. You don't have to do anything. No 
special paperwork. No license fees.  Nobody to go get permission from to 
operate the radio.  The nice part is  that it him allows anyone to operate  the 
product and started up without any issues of having to get licenses or jump 
through certain hoops  of where you can place the product. It is a freedom 
thing.

Inside the air Fiber Design  -- As far as I know no one builds a modem with 
this level of sophistication.   Most people when the building modem commit to 
custom silicon.   But doing it this way is very expensive very time-consuming. 
It is rigid in its architecture. If you make mistake, you cannot reprogram it.  
 If someone wants to change a feature, it's locked in stone and too late, once 
it is committed.   We call this a modem but there may be times that we can 
actually change the identity of it by loading new software into it on the fly.  
  This programmable. It is flexible. And it can basically do whatever function 
you want to do.

With most systems, the farther you get away, the longer the amount of time that 
you have to wait for the packet to actually get there.   we actually have a 
patent pending that allows us to synchronously  send packets in between radios. 
So that packets transmitted from both ends of the link and actually meet in 
space halfway in between.   It does not have to wait before it transmits. In 
this case they are both synchronize through global positioning  And they can 
send packets simultaneously

[This next  paragraph is a summary] They point out at the end that in the 
developing world there are many people who given the high scrap value of copper 
are motivated to dig up copper cables between transmission centers in order to 
sell the copper. And furthermore that in many cases they go looking for cables 
and do not understand the difference between a fiber-optic cable copper cable. 
When they find the cable, they cut in order to extract it. And when they see 
it's not  fiber, they just leave it alone.   The nice thing about our solution 
is that other than the radios themselves there is nothing you have to protect 
in between the point-to-point links.  [End summary]

When you are given an opportunity to try to create something new and do 
something differently than anyone else has done, as an engineer, that's always 
very exciting.  Ubiquiti has a reputation for being very disruptive in the 
market place and we found hat very attractive.  We like to think about products 
differently than anyone else.  It is going to be a whole lot less costly and 
much higher performance than anything else that is out there right now.


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On Mar 29, 2012, at 1:58 PM, Josh Baird wrote:

> Anyhow, check the
> video out on ubnt.com for an introduction and technical overview -
> it's worth watching.

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