BelAir Networks is known for powering the biggest public WiFi networks in North America: Minneapolis, Toronto, and Cablevision's in-progress New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut network for its cable data subscribers. (See our overview, "Second wind for muni WiFi?")

That might make today's announcement by BelAir of the BelAir20, an indoor 802.11n access point, seem a little odd. For a firm that's known for having its nodes strung outdoors, why point inwards? "Because our customers asked us to, which is a good place to be in," said Stephen Rayment, the chief technical officer and BelAir's co-founder.





BelAir's happy extended family of WiFi nodes gets a new baby brother

"Over and over again, we got requests from all these service providers customers: 'BelAir, it's not just outdoors, it's not just beaming indoors from outdoors, there's a totally indoor component to this as well,'" he said. Rayment said the growing service provider industry, which builds WiFi hotspots and hotzones for hotels, conference centers, hospitals, and mass transit, has specific needs and price points that BelAir thinks it can fill.

Rayment acknowledged the industry his firm is in has changed focus enormously since the collapse of many city-wide wireless proposals, and the success in Minneapolis is a rare exception. "It's now all about targeted coverage as opposed to the silly stuff people were asking us to do three or four years ago: 95 percent of the metropolitan area on day one," he said. "This outdoor WiFi stuff is still tough to do: a lot of the hurdles you have to go over to deploy indoors is less," and that has led to more expansion in interior venues by the companies that BelAir works with.

Shifting targets



Municipal WiFi stumbled in 2007 after more two years of attempts to build citywide networks that typically had no particular purpose, were paid for by private firms building the networks, and that used optimistically high projections of uptake and low projections of hardware required.

New rollouts are smaller, more focused on specific purposes, and tend to grow over time as goals are achieved or usage targets are met. BelAir's view echoes what other companies in the same market, including Meraki, have said: inexpensive nodes that mesh over the same band they use to serve clients are the future.

BelAir's architecture, like that of many enterprise-targeted wireless network systems, builds atop existing network management and authentication. A device, when it associates with a BelAir20 (or any BelAir node), has its MAC address passed back to the network core. Rayment said that a client can go anywhere in Minneapolis "without ever having to re-register as long as he's got contiguous coverage."



The BelAir20 reaches from outdoors to indoors to extend management and authentication for large-scale networks

The BelAir20 (list $1,199) acts as an extension of existing networks, whether those using BelAir technology or otherwise, although there's tight integration with other equipment from the firm. The device's default configuration has two concurrent 802.11n radios: one devoted to 2.4GHz and one that can work over either 2.4GHz or 5GHz. The radios each support two spatial streams using a 3x3 MIMO array for resilient performance. Rayment said the device can use existing 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) wiring with both radios active at full power.

Added to a BelAir network, the second radio would be set to 5GHz, where it would use mesh networking for backhaul; the 2.4GHz-only radio would handle 802.11b/g/n clients. BelAir was an early proponent of multiple-radio wireless nodes, generally deprecating single-radio mesh as too difficult to provide consistently high throughput. BelAir sells nodes with two to four radios depending on uses, including nodes designed for the 4.9GHz public-safety band in the U.S.

Rayment says that 802.11n isn't fully baked yet for the outdoor environment, where he's waiting to see performance in individual data streams that beats what BelAir's current gear can provide with individual 802.11g and 802.11a radios. "Fundamentally, I do absolutely believe that N is useful outdoors," he said; it's just a matter of time.

By adding enterprise-like features and 802.11n to an indoor node, intended as an extension or a bridge, it's clear that BelAir has aims on the rich vein of corporate networking that Cisco, HP (through its Colubris acquisition), Trapeze (part of Belden), and other firms now own. Rayment doesn't deny that's an ultimate goal. For now, though, the move is "really a logical evolution for us to augment our existing customers with this combined indoor/outdoor solution."

What this node does, at last, is unite two previously demarcated network types, something that led to many of the inflated expectations and poor outcomes for early metro-scale WiFi networks. BelAir may be the first company in this space to reach inside in quite this integrated a fashion, but expect to see new products, partnerships, and acquisitions as the outdoor meets the indoor. The wireless LAN and wireless WAN might finally have the wall between them broken down.