Strix Wins Big Japanese Mesh Deal

WiFi mesh startup Strix Systems Inc. has scored one of the largest multi-city 802.11 municipal deals yet announced, working with an NTT Group subsidiary to unwire a hundred cities in Japan over the next couple of years. The firm is working with NTT West and Network Value Components to deploy the network, which will use Strix’s Access/One OWS and IWS modular mesh products to provide voice, video, and data services in both indoor and outdoor settings. Nan Chen, Strix’s VP of marketing, says that the network could cover “about 50 million people” by the time it is completed, although he’s not sure which cities NTT plans to include in the deployment.

Unlike many of the municipal deployments of mesh networking in the U.S., Chen says that the NTT rollout will have more of an enterprise focus at least to begin with. The goal is to primarily cover business customers as well as residential,” says Chen. “There are a lot of businesses that really wanted to have managed services.”

The raison d’etre behind this, according to Chen, is that enterprises will help to make the network viable by paying for initial services — such as voice, data, and mobile access to corporate applications — then NTT can extend its offerings further afield. Continue >>