GigaBeam Corporation announces that it has successfully completed installation of its WiFiber wireless fiber solution for the first phase of a wireless backbone network for the City and County of San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). The wireless network will serve as complementary and redundant links to SFPUC's more traditional leased lines network. The SFPUC selected GigaBeam's WiFiber wireless fiber solution to be the core of its wireless communications network because of WiFiber's capacity of fiber speed. High-speed transmission is needed to support data, voice and video communications between geographically diverse field locations and commission offices.
The first phase of the deployment involved the installation of two WiFiber back-to-back links between major facilities. Live video, data and voice over IP (VoIP) were successfully enabled over the links demonstrating how multiple locations of video, data and voice can be aggregated and carried over sequential GigaBeam WiFiber links without affecting quality of service. Large file transfers were tested over the link and files which previously took 2-1/2 hours to transfer took less than 5 minutes. The speed of WiFiber operating at a gigabit-per-second had impressive results. GigaBeam's WiFiber is a very cost effective alternative for the SFPUC compared to expensive installation of terrestrial fiber.
Lou Slaughter, GigaBeam's Chairman and CEO said, "This successful deployment with the SFPUC is exciting because it validates the use of our WiFiber for use by city and state governments. WiFiber is a technology that communicates at the speed of terrestrial fiber but at a price significantly less than fiber. This is very important to government agencies which all have tight budgets and yet are expected to provide sophisticated high speed access to constituents and city agencies.
GigaBeam WiFiber operates in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz radio spectrum bands. This portion of the radio frequency spectrum has been authorized by the Federal Communications Commission for wireless point-to-point commercial use. Use of these frequency bands for commercial use was pioneered by GigaBeam's founders.
GigaBeam's technology, utilizing these large blocks of authorized contiguous spectrum, enables multi Gigabit-per-second wireless communications through use of Gigabit Ethernet protocols. The current speed achieved by GigaBeam's WiFiber product lines is one Gigabit-per-second - equivalent to 647 T1 lines or 1,000 DSL connections. GigaBeam also plans deployment of future products capable of 10 Gigabits-per-second which is the 10 Gigabit Ethernet protocol standard.
GigaBeam's WiFiber technology is similar to terrestrial fiber in terms of speed and reliability for deployment in Metropolitan Area Networks (MANS). However, WiFiber has a substantial advantage over terrestrial fiber because WiFiber can be deployed in a day and costs less to deploy than terrestrial fiber. Terrestrial fiber can take months to deploy and also require significant regulatory and environmental approvals prior to installation.