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| November 21, 2005 | Press Release |
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| Strix Chosen to Provide Wireless Mesh Network to Republic of Macedonia |
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| Portfolio Company: Strix Systems |
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Strix's Access/One Outdoor Wireless System (OWS) to Unwire 1,000+ Square-Mile Country
CALABASAS, Calif., Nov. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Strix Systems, the leader in high-performance wireless mesh networking, today announced that the Republic of Macedonia has selected Strix's Access/One Outdoor Wireless System (OWS) to create a country-wide wireless mesh network. The 1,000+ square-mile deployment, which is funded and deployed by Macedonian service provider On.Net, will be the single largest broadband wireless network in the world, providing high speed data, voice, and video capabilities to the entire population of over two million people.
On.Net has already deployed Strix's high-performance, multi-radio wireless mesh throughout Macedonia's capital city of Skopje, which provides wireless broadband capabilities to the nearly one million inhabitants.
"This contract and the initial deployment of Strix's multi-radio mesh in Skopje is the first step in a process that will help to make the internet affordable, sustainable, and competitive throughout the Republic of Macedonia," said Predrag Cemerikic, CEO of On.Net. "This will enable consumers, businesses, and the government to use the Internet for many activities which are crucial for the development of the country."
On.Net selected Strix Systems after testing multiple single- and dual-radio wireless mesh products over the past seven months. Due to the mountainous terrain of the country and the inherent throughput limitations of single- and dual-radio solutions, all other systems failed to provide acceptable levels of performance for even basic data services, not to mention real-time services like wireless VoIP (wVoIP). Only Strix's multi-radio wireless mesh networking system, which dedicates radios for each separate function of the mesh (client access, backhaul ingress, and backhaul egress) could bypass the challenges of the terrain and meet On.Net's cost, coverage, and throughput capacity needs. Moving forward, On.Net will also be a standardizing on Strix's Access/One products and has created a model for deploying broadband wireless in other developing countries based on the capabilities of Strix's technology.
"Macedonia is known for its mountainous terrain, deep basins, and large valleys -- none of which is conducive to deploying a wireless network. When On.Net was entrusted with building a network that would overcome these challenges, we did our due diligence and tested virtually every wireless mesh networking system on the market," said Cemerikic. "The differences we saw in our testing were unbelievable. Strix is by far the highest performance mesh system and is the easiest to deploy, hands down. The ability of its multi-radio mesh nodes to auto-configure and provide high throughput -- even in tricky areas -- is incredible."
Strix's Access/One solutions employ a unique modular, multi-radio, multi-channel, and multi-RF wireless mesh architecture that provides the high throughput and low latency needed to support wireless voice, video, and data applications today so that On.Net will not need to make system upgrades to provide these services. This modular architecture is fully flexible and scalable, allowing Macedonia's network to grow simply and affordably in the future. Strix's architecture already provides mechanisms to support QoS, solving problems such as bandwidth degradation, network latency, and application priority contention. Because Strix networks operate at both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz unlicensed spectra, on multiple channels of each spectra simultaneously, Strix can separate client access from the mesh backbone, enabling the system to dynamically optimize data paths, circumnavigate network congestion and interference, and adjust in real time to avoid network failure.
"Macedonia's initiative to unwire the entire country is truly innovative, and is an incredible validation of the ease-of-deployment, manageability, and performance that Strix's multi-radio mesh networks can provide -- even in hard-to-deploy areas," said Nan Chen, Vice President of Marketing at Strix Systems. "On.Net should be commended for the amount of research they put into this project, and Strix is honored to be selected over all other mesh vendors for a project of this magnitude. This is a true indicator of the ability of Strix's multi-radio, multi-channel, multi-RF mesh system to scale and provide high-speed wireless broadband that can support data, voice, and video in any deployment scenario at the most cost effective price in the industry."
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