MuniWireless

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.