Dedicated Wireless Point-to-Point Services in Orange County
by Mark Carpenter, CEO, Centricity Communications

Irvine, CA, USA, March 26, 2007 — Today’s offices fully utilize local area networking (LAN) technologies, including routers, switches, and centralized servers, to allow employees to better connect and to efficiently collaborate within the office environment.

However, for companies with multiple site locations within a regional area, it remains prohibitively expensive to provide an extension of that same LAN based network architecture using a private, dedicated wired T1 / T3 / OC-3 type connection, particularly for small to mid-sized businesses. Therefore, these companies either still rely on ftp, email, hosted servers, and web collaborative tools to exchange office data in real-time, or they go to the next step and connect their offices over the Internet (layer 3) via VPN or other tunneling protocols.

While the Internet can provide a medium for peer-to-peer connectivity between office locations, it can prove a slower solution due to protocol overhead and can contain security concerns since the Internet is inherently a shared network medium. Furthermore, each office location must have its own individual Internet provider, and using the Internet for both access and internetworking between office locations can increase the overhead in the system and require additional bandwidth to support it.

In 2001, the IEEE and ETSI technology standards groups began working on commercial wireless broadband standards that could provide the last mile more cost-effectively, bypassing fixed line installations and access fees, while still providing the same level of commercial service. These groups drafted what became the 802.16 WiMAX™ standard, which builds upon technology from the well-known 802.11 WiFi standard used today at offices and hotspots throughout the world, but at a commercial class level with much further range (5-30 miles) at high bandwidth (1.5Mbps to 80Mbps).

These commercial fixed wireless units create a dedicated point-to-point (P2P) connection between two office locations or to a data center, and operate on a private layer 2 switch network, effectively extending the office LAN within its same subnet. Since they do not utilize an existing fixed line, there is no shared traffic on the connection, and more importantly no local access fees applied to use that line, so a company can create this private network for a fraction of the cost, with service providers starting at $199 per month for a symmetrical, dedicated 1.5 Mbps T1 class connection.

As an additional benefit, only one central office location needs to deliver the Internet provider services, which can be relayed through the extended LAN to the other office locations, further saving cost. The commercial fixed wireless service provider can also provide the Internet backhaul services to the P2P network, if required.

Next generation technologies have been developed to bridge the gap and provide more cost-effective last mile solutions to businesses. Orange County, as one of the leading regional technology centers in the U.S., already has these services installed in the area from leading service providers, ready to better internetwork your business locations.

About the Author
Mark Carpenter is founder and CEO of Centricity Communications LLC, a provider of fixed wireless point-to-point and Internet services for small to mid-sized businesses in Orange County, delivering commercial services from 1.5Mbps to 80Mbps. For more information about Centricity please visit www.centricitycomm.com or you can contact Mark directly at mark.carpenter@centricitycomm.com.