Belair Networks announces first SLA to guarantee muni Wi-Fi deployments
Belair Networks announced at the Muniwireless conference in Boston today, that Minneapolis will be the first city to receive performance guarantees for its muni mesh network.Belair Networks announced at the Muniwireless conference in Boston today, that Minneapolis will be the first city to receive performance guarantees for its muni mesh network. The network is being builty by service provider US Internet.
The new program is the first Service Level Agreement (SLA) I’ve seen offered to service providers that insures the vendor will provide necessary equipment to bring performance up to expectation if the original design does not meet muster.
SLAs for muni deployments is a new idea but I expect we’ll soon be seing more of them. A metro mesh is no good if it a) doesen’t work, or b) has numerous holes or dead zones where users cannot pull a signal.
Under BelAir Networks’ Certified Network Design Program, service providers using Belair equipment in municipal deployments submit their network designs to the company for performance certification. Once the design is certified and the companies engage in an SLA, Belair will stand behind the design and provide whatever additional antennas may be needed if the design fails to perform to the city’s expectations.
Jim Freeze, Belair Networks’ senior vice president of marketing, who I caught up with this morning at the conference, told me that certification will be tied entirely to the business objectives of the RFP. This not only requires Belair to share the risk of performance guarantees with the service provider, it also ups the ante for cities writing RFPs to insure that they adequately define their performance expectations. The winner, of course, is the users who will see the network deliver on promised levels of performance.
Those of you now attending our conference can learn more about the program by visiting BelAir’s booth in the exhibition hall here at the Newton Marriott.
Click here to read the Belair announcement.
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Excellent. Finally some one is addressing the issue of certification of these networks and adding credibility to the Metro Area Wireless Mesh networks. Will be interested to see how many 1 and 2 radio mesh Node providers step up to the plate on providing SLA’s.
You will note that BelAir (as well as Strix)can deploy a 4 and or 6 radio Mesh Node which contributes to their ability to provide a viable SLA to the Cities. These systems are robust enough to deliver on the access (per node performance) side of the network due mainly to the capabilities of the backhaul between nodes.
Again, it is the selection of the best technology, not just the service provider, that will allow these networks to provide the performance expected of a Broadband Services.
Will watch with interest how the Muni and their consultants respond to this form of performance guarantees.
Jacomo
The process of establishing SLAs, and tweaking network design to meet them, was an important part of the Proof of Concept testing in Philadelphia. There is an overview of that process here: http://www.wirelessphiladelphia.org/blog_detail.cfm/blog/19.