Turkish Wi-Fi and set-top specialist AirTies is working on something rather revolutionary in Wi-Fi for the video market, relying on its mesh technology working alongside powerline and potentially other wired technologies such as MoCA.
The company has realized that its proprietary mesh software, which runs on top of chips made by providers like Quantenna and Broadcom, is able to solve the massive drop off in Wi-Fi performance that the average home experiences on a daily basis.
It has amassed a ton of statistics from work with its partner operators, companies like BSkyB in the UK and Swisscom in Switzerland, which show that, without the mesh, connections perform well through the ceiling or one wall, but not through both. AirTies chairman Bulent Celebi said: ‘Wi-Fi performance degrades over distance and more rapidly when crossing walls and floors. The problem gets more acute in concrete houses and is even worse in 5GHz than in 2.4GHz. Because Wi-Fi is a shared medium in each channel or frequency band, it loses capacity when there is a single slow link, at the edge.’
It’s this issue that mesh networks improve, driving up the connection from 15Mbps to 105Mbps in the test. The problem gets more acute when a slow tablet is introduced to a network, especially one designed to handle IP clients to distribute a signal from a multiroom DVR. By turning all the nodes into an access point and intelligently routing the right packets to them, slow tablets connect at the highest speed they can to the closest mesh point.
‘The test framework used to get these figures is a two-storey concrete apartment. We used our products being deployed at Swisscom using the Quantenna 4×4 11n chips. Additional testing is in progress showing the impact of tablets or other slower chip technology,’ Celebi said.
But the most important opportunity is the next one that AirTies is targeting, tying up IEEE1905 technology which can work with Wi-Fi, powerline or MoCA in a full mesh, such that any communication that goes through a wall could be sent at full speed by the powerline or MoCA component, rather than being slowed down on Wi-Fi. This can be altered on a packet-by-packet basis.
Celebi said: ‘We want use P1905 to create a fully aggregated mesh net in the home.’ The P1905 standard, as it sits, allows a connection to route either over powerline or over Wi-Fi, without the traffic being aggregated over both as if they were one network. The AirTies product will go into trials later this year.
In June this year Broadcom announced an SoC which uses the HomePlug powerline technology as well as Ethernet and WiFi 802.11ac. The beauty of this is that it gets rid of the premium that customers have to pay for meshing the Quantenna chips, because the hops through walls would likely divert to powerline most of the time, and the Wi-Fi would still be as effective. So it would be cheaper to make, and come in well under the electricity requirements set by Europe. AirTies said this would be ready for a field trial the end of the year and that it might add MoCA as another link later.
Already AirTies has been supporting the BSkyB video-on-demand OTT service Sky Now, which is going to 2.7m UK homes. In 1.5m of those, AirTies has provided the Wi-Fi bridge this year, effectively with a tiny box plugged into both the home gateway and another in the TV.