By Naomi Graychase
June 30, 2009
Firetide has released its new HotPort 6000-900, the company’s first product to operate in the 900 MHz spectrum, which enables clients to run high-bandwidth applications in environments where achieving line-of-sight is difficult or impossible.
The HotPort 6000-900 is targeted primarily at public utilities where it can increase the capacity of existing SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) backhaul connections. With real-world throughput of up to 26Mbps, it enables bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video surveillance, and extends mesh reliability into non-line-of-site scenarios.
Firetide’s “wireless infrastructure mesh” approach has met with success in public and private video surveillance markets. Clients include the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which uses Firetide equipment as part of its Advanced Surveillance and Protection Plan, and the Phoenix, AZ Police Department, which used a Firetide network to protect visitors during Super Bowl XLII.
“When we started the company, we designed the network from the ground up to be a multi-service network,” says Ksenia Coffman, Marketing Communications Manager at Firetide. “Our systems have capabilities uniquely designed for high-bandwidth and low-latency to achieve evidence-grade video. Our virtual Internet switch runs proprietary protocols and to the IT administrator, it appears as though it were a regular switch; its completely transparent, that’s what sets us apart.”
The HotPort 6000-900 mesh is uniquely designed for the noisy 900 MHz spectrum, says Coffman. It employs Firetide’s ‘Smart Adaptive’ mesh technology to mitigate the effects of interference that typically bring down wireless throughput and reliability in this band. “Firetide’s noise-aware data path and noise filtering algorithms enable mesh to better handle interference from other 900 MHz devices, as well as from adjacent frequency bands taken up by cellular and 3G traffic. Tools, such as the spectrum analyzer, which is integrated into the product, allow a network administrator to remotely monitor the health of the network and take actions to further optimize the network performance,” says Coffman.
