Wireless WiFi Mesh Networks for Rural Towns and Cities

Located on the banks of the Ohio River, Owensboro is Kentucky's third-largest city. Owensboro has grown steadily, while retaining the "small town quality" of a friendly city of warm-hearted and hospitable people. Owensboro is Kentucky's third largest city and is the industrial, cultural, retail and healthcare center of western Kentucky.

Owensboro is called a festival city, with over 20 annual community celebrations that attract visitors from around the country and around the world. Owensboro has also been called a "City of Churches". To date, there are more than 150 Protestant churches, 18 Catholic churches and one Jewish synagogue in Daviess County. The area's largest faiths are Baptist and Catholic. Churches first began to form in our community around 1815. From barbecue to bluegrass, from fine arts to fine dining, from convention center business to the business of having fun, you will find it in Owensboro.

While the population has grown steadily, Owensboro still offers a "small town" look and feel. Technology options have often been slow to come and offering very little from a competitive perspective. "Before PowerNet Global came to offer service to our town, we didn’t have any options. The bigger phone companies don’t offer service in our area, so we had no real access to the Internet,” stated a resident of Owensboro.

Being the one of the oldest and predominant competitive carriers in Kentucky, PowerNet Global (PNG) and KW Communications installed five towers with Strix Outdoor Wireless Systems (OWS) for long-range and coverage, delivering Internet and business-class services to the population of 100,000. Strix Access/One products gave PNG low-cost advantage while delivering the highest quality, highest performance wireless WiFi networks and provided the utility of future expansion for new services.

“This is a great opportunity to grow our business and to grow the business in the communities of these underserved markets,” states PowerNet Global’s CEO and President Bernie Stevens. “We know that by going in to these rural markets and giving them something they are not getting from anyone else is a great benefit to our business model and an even greater benefit to them.”

A previously underserved community, Owensboro now has five towers spread across the county.  PNG’s service, called “LiquidGrid”, includes five transmission sites installed with Strix Access/One OWS products that cover a 20 square mile area for Owensboro. 

LiquidGrid brings broadband Internet access as a last mile and mobile Internet service, but also private high speed services are provided using Strix Edge Wireless Systems (EWS) customer premise equipment (CPE) for increased coverage and higher throughput to residents , businesses ,  corporations , manufacturing , industrial , transportation services, police department , the municipality and more.

Strix Access/One OWS builds small-to-large scale outdoor wireless WiFi hot spots, hot-zones and city-wide coverage while Strix Indoor Wireless System (IWS) and Edge Wireless System (EWS) are designed to place at the end-user location, whether residential or a business respectively.

The Strix Access/One OWS and IWSmodular mesh products deliver the largest capacity (up to six radios and 768 users per node, three to six times the norm), highest throughput (five times the norm at 35 Mbps), and best scalability (users can add more radio boards or new technologies). An independent wireless mesh test, sponsored by Light Reading and completed in June 2006, found Strix’s OWS 2400-30delivers the best throughput and capacity and the greatest scalability for voice applications and mobility/roaming.  Strix networks scale to 10 or more wireless hops with near-zero throughput loss and latency, enabling customers to deliver real-time applications with a minimum of wired connections for a given area, which reduces CapEx and OpEx. 

PNG uses the EWS increases the range, coverage and performance of the network by providing a four-fold increase in power in contrast to your existing wireless WiFi-enabled laptop. The EWS offers the greatest range, coverage and performance of any WiFI end-user device on the market.

It's not only about power, by improving signal strength, the mesh network is quickly detected, optimal channels selected and the client connection secured. but capabilities such as dual diversity and the algorithms that optimize the wireless signals, maintaining the highest integrity signals and allowing for the highest performance reception and transmission of voice, video and data over an IP/Internet networks.

PNG expects to add voice over ip (VoIP) as an option to the service sometime in 2007.  Having previously deployed VoIP gateways, which now blanket the United States, has allowed them to offer extremely competitive (wholesale) domestic and International termination services.  Most recently, PNG deployed a class 5/feature server that allows it to offer residential, SMB and Enterprise level VoIP services throughout the United States.   This experience willenable PNG to develop and deliver high quality VoIP services capitalizing on Strix Access/One’s high throughput, low latency and optimization of voice, video and data services.

Customers of Strix Access/One Mesh Network Systems are around the world, having deployed thousands Strix has also garnered a series of awards and reference customers as a result.