Wi3 hopes to change how you think about networking in the home or office. The company’s WiPNET line of products allows you to use existing coaxial cabling in your home to connect devices to the internet using a high-speed network most houses already have. This is an industry standard called Multimedia over Coax (MoCA). Even if you’ve never heard of MoCA, chances are it’s already in use in your home. MoCA is an industry standard for all of the multimedia content used by cable TV providers. The onscreen guide, TiVO, or any other content that comes over the coax that isn’t actually TV programming are all MoCA content. It utilizes unused spectrum present in all coaxial cabling to carry data.
WiPNET uses that same spectrum to carry TCP/IP traffic throughout your home, with a cartridge and sleeve concept for installing. You remove the existing coaxial faceplate, connect the coax to the back of the sleeve, slide it into the wall, and replace the face-plate. Then, all you have to do is insert the cartridge into the sleeve and connect your devices. This provides a unique capability for the homeowner to update a small part of the system in the future to add new technologies as they become available. The real brilliance behind this concept becomes evident when you use the WiPNET WiFi cartridge. It takes mesh WiFi networking to a new level.
If you try to create a seamless WiFi network throughout a home or business, you run into a lot of fine-tuning issues. You need to make sure your signal is strong enough so you can repeat it with repeaters or additional wireless access points, but not so strong that it interferes with the end signals for users to connect to. The signals in a room would be strong, but it would also be hard to get good bandwidth from any one WiFi signal. That is the biggest problem in homes, especially in apartment buildings. Sure, you open up the list of available wireless networks and you probably see a number of networks that all indicate they are broadcasting a very strong signal. But if you check your bandwidth, it will likely be low because of the interference of other WiFi signals. The other problem with a network using a repeater schema is that the first repeater can have interference (walls, air ducts, microwaves, etc.) between it and the original WiFi source. If you have three walls and a heating duct between the WiFi source and the repeater you might be down to 30 percent of the potential bandwidth of what the WiFi source is capable of producing. There is also an increase of noise on the network, so you are repeating bad packets. Each layer out from the original source you have less and less potential bandwidth. Real world tests show that WiFi in the home can only do 10 to 30 Mbits per second. We can see the flaws in WiFi networking.
The advantage of WiPNET networking is that every WiFi unit you install has a a wired coax backbone, so you’ve now removed the potential for any noise to creep into the network and also removed the issue of walls, concrete, heating ducts, and other obstacles. Every WiFi unit has full bandwidth potential wherever they are installed. You have wireless that performs liked a wired network. The system relies on the same standards used in wireless mesh networking so that clients are always connected to the strongest signal wherever they are in the home or office. Wi3 Inc will be announcing something new at the International CES show next week and should make for an exciting addition to their lineup. The thought of having WiFi mesh networking in the home is an exciting idea.
Who has coax running through their home?