Multisource’s super WiFi with 10km2 range sets MyBroadband conference buzzing

The MyBroadband Conference, held at Vodacom World yesterday, revealed that one of the top trends in the telecommunications industry is the quest for mobility. Multisource Telecoms, wireless communication specialist and platinum sponsor of the conference, launched its Altai product suite at the event, bringing to South Africa Wi-Fi products that blow the capabilities of other Wi-Fi systems out of the water.

The ability of the Altai products to provide truly wide area access, to create “hot-zones” or “hot-regions” as opposed to hotspots was a major talking point of the show. While existing Wi-Fi systems typically produce Wi-Fi hotspots with a maximum range of 200 to 300 square metres, the new Altai range is capable of creating a Wi-Fi hot zone of up to 10 square kilometres.

“Where internet connectivity via fibre to the home was previously considered to be the utopia, it is now more about the ability to receive high capacity broadband access whilst on the move and between disparate mobile access mediums,” said Richard Smuts-Steyn, chief executive officer of Multisource. “It’s all about the device and a search for exceptional wireless access and in this regard, the Altai product suite delivers superbly.”

The launch of the Altai range also opened up a renewed interest and confidence in the ability to seamlessly hand off voice and data communications from GSM to WiFi in select regions. “The Altai range allows for high capacity data offload onto a Wi-Fi network that not only reduces the data burden on the GSM infrastructure, but provides far higher throughputs than currently provided by even the 4G networks,” Smuts-Steyn explained.

Data throughput using super Wi-Fi is capable of transmitting up to 80 megabits per second, compared to 3G, which has a capability of 10 megabits per second and basic ADSL, with a capability of only 512 kilobits per second. The system is also very stable and reliable.

The second trend clearly forefront in most service providers’ minds was the quality of their backhaul links. Where Dark Fibre Africa is doing a superb job of providing fibre access to most players, there remain strong requirements for the immediacy of microwave backhaul. Sadly there are still long delays and expenses in seeking ICASA licenses and thus the availability of the Alcoma 17GHz link as a high capacity, medium distance, license free link was another point of excitement for most that visited the Multisource stand.

“Multisource would like to thank MyBroadband for their support of the industry, for facilitating this show, and for the opportunity to present our state-of-the-art product offerings to the industry,” Smuts-Steyn said.

For more information visit www.multisource.co.za