BT Wholesale today launched a trial of mesh radio technology for the delivery of broadband services.
At the start of the trial in Pontypridd, South Wales, BT Wholesale chief executive Paul Reynolds said that mesh radio had the potential to widen the reach of BT Wholesale's broadband delivery.
Paul Reynolds said: "We are relentlessly pursuing all technological and partnership opportunities to bring broadband to more homes and businesses. We want more people to grasp the advantages that fast, always-on internet access can bring.
"This trial, with Radiant Networks mesh radio solution, will give us an extended look at the technology in a real-life situation and let us explore its suitability for BT to deliver broadband services in areas beyond the reach of ADSL."
The trial of MESHWORKS™, a broadband mesh radio solution developed by Radiant Networks, through to December this year will evaluate the technology for BT Wholesale. Households taking part in the trial will receive interactive television and video-on-demand (VOD) content from Cardiff-based interactive TV solutions provider Yes Television.
Mesh radio solutions work on the principle that the small radio antenna installed at each household or business, transmits on to neighbouring users to form a network or "mesh". This approach does away with the need for large antennae or masts used to transmit to each individual customer in traditional point to multipoint wireless solutions.
The trial covers an 80kmē area around Pontypridd including Llantrisant, Beddau and Newtown Llantwit and surrounding villages. It will involve about 100 households mainly of employees of BT and Yes Television in a mixture of urban, semi-rural and rural settings, many of which are outside the current reach of ADSL.
BT Wholesale has enabled 1,117 exchanges for ADSL, including Pontypridd, covering 66 per cent of UK homes and businesses and 73 per cent of current internet users.
Paul Reynolds added: "We have brought broadband to Pontypridd in one of the biggest ADSL roll-outs in history but we want to make it available to people beyond the town centre and to test its potential for similar areas across the UK. "
"Together with our trials of high speed internet by satellite, this trial shows our commitment to looking at ways of delivering broadband economically to more rural areas and extending the boundaries of broadband Britain."
Radiant Networks chief executive officer, Geoff Butcher said: "We are excited to be working with BT to extend broadband coverage throughout the UK. Connecting BT's customers to our MESHWORKS™ network in a real environment is a major step in demonstrating the deployability of our technology on a mass scale."
Yes Television will deploy its VOD software engine, enabling viewers to pause, fast forward and rewind high quality video content over the network. Content from Yes Media includes more than 100 movies, with new titles added each month, and hundreds of music videos from a wide range of artists.
Yes Television chief executive officer, Thomas Kressner, said: "Yes Television is committed to delivering TV services over any suitable broadband network on behalf of service providers. We have already delivered services over ADSL and HFC cable, and BT Wholesale's trial gives us the opportunity to do the same over mesh radio."
As the trial progresses high speed internet will be added to the service for some participants. Video on demand has been chosen as the core content for the trial as its higher bandwidth demands will ensure the most robust test of the broadband delivery mechanism BT Wholesale is evaluating.
About Radiant:
Radiant was established in 1997 to develop and commercialise an innovative new Mesh fixed broadband wireless access technology. The first Radiant Mesh networks were deployed in 2001. During 1997-1999, Radiant raised US$10 million through private and institutional investors, which funded development of the technology. Advent Venture Partners, Intel Capital, executives of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co and Sandler Capital Management raised a further US$20 million in 2000. This second round of financing was used in product development and to fund investment in sales and marketing. The recent third round funding provided Radiant with the working capital required to fulfil its substantial order book and ongoing development.
About MESHWORKS™
Broadband Wireless: MESHWORKS™ is a new generation of broadband access technology that allows business and residential customers to connect with adjacent customers or neighbours rather than a base station. Using roof-mounted nodes with steerable, directional arrays, each node in a Radiant Mesh transmits to and receives from other nodes, routing around obstacles and eliminating the problems of line-of-sight. Multiple paths are provided for each customer, ensuring enhanced resilience. This allows telecoms operators to provide customers with voice and high-speed Internet services that include high-bandwidth applications such as video-conferencing, video-on demand and other multimedia content, but avoids the huge initial capital investments associated with base station infrastructure.
MESHWORKS™ technology delivers up to 25 Mbit/s full duplex to end-users. Radiant Mesh has significant advantages over current systems. They are:
Radio spectrum is used up to 50 times more efficiently, enabling massive increases in data capacity for end users at high customer densities. (600 customers/km2).
It delivers near 100% customer coverage enabling wide scale provision of services.
Without base stations, it provides more economic proposition to operators, reducing upfront investment and scaling costs with revenues.
Radiant estimates that positive cash flow can be generated in less than half the time it would take with a conventional broadband network. No other broadband technology in the world is currently positioned to deliver these advantages.
These characteristics enable operators to widely deploy broadband services to businesses and homes.
About Yes Television
Yes Television provides white-label solutions and products to operators who wish to deploy interactive broadband services. The company is structured as two client-facing divisions. Yes Media is the content solutions division, providing world-leading content licensing and management solutions to broadband operators, content owners and broadcasters. Yes Media offers a one-stop shop focused on acquisition and distribution of programming, development of broadband services and digital encoding and secure management of content.
YesTechnology is a division that provides a scalable, adaptable and operationally-efficient software product and associated professional integration services, allowing operators to deploy massive amounts of diverse content rapidly to their subscribers.
Yes Television supplies the video on demand solution to Kingston Interactive Television's service, delivered over ADSL in the UK. It has launched its commercial trial in Hong Kong and is active in a number of key international markets. In Australia Yes Television supplies the technology and operations to Total Television Australia.
