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By Dave Watson
Originally Published: April, 2003
By: Georgia
Straight
 If
you don't read the business pages very often or peruse fine trade publications
like Broadband Week, Network World Fusion, Broadband Wireless Business Magazine,
and Telephony, you probably haven't heard of fSONA Communications Corporation
(www.fsona.com), a privately held local company that creates wireless technology.
Incorporated in 1997, fSONA spent four years developing and testing its technology--primarily
in Vancouver--before launching its first commercial product two years ago.
Since then, fSONA has sold its systems in 24 countries but only attracted
minimal notice at home. If you've seen one of its units bolted to a building
around town, you probably thought it was an overbuilt security camera mysteriously
pointing to another building. See sample
pictures...
What makes fSONA--which stands for "free-space optical network architecture"--interesting
is the technology behind it all. With a pair of transmitter-receivers you
can wirelessly network together just about any two points as far as four kilometres
apart, provided you can establish a clear line of sight between them. (The
simplest setup, with two units, costs about $20,000.) What's more, the technology
is insanely fast, with connection speeds starting at 100 megabits per second--about
200 times the speed of cable Internet access on a good day--and ranging up
to 1.5 gigabits. And that's just what's commercially available. Some demonstration
tests have clocked in at speeds up to 160 gigabits. The company's SONAbeam
technology was named 2002 product of the year by Network Magazine.
How's it work? With invisible laser beams that are low-powered and eye-safe.
Instead of travelling between two places via a fibre-optic link, the information
is beamed point-to-point using telescopelike lenses and detectors that react
to the specific wavelength of light emitted by the lasers. I spoke with Kelly
Irvin, fSONA's director for Canada, by telephone (incidentally, fSONA's Web
site claims Alexander Graham Bell experimented with optical transmission in
the late 19th century) about the company.
Irvin came to fSONA two years ago when its first product was commercially
released. His background is in telecommunications, mostly with the former
BC Tel. It was the combination of wireless operation and optical speeds that
drew him to the firm. "In the telecom game, those two worlds were entirely
separate," he says. "Wireless was always lower-speed, and optical
was a world in itself. Optical and wireless together almost sounded too good
to be true. I guess the attraction [for him] was the ability to build a technology
that combined the best of both....One of our first links in Vancouver was
from Harbour Centre to a building on Broadway [about 2.5 kilometres]. Consider
how difficult a build it would be to put a piece of fibre [through] with all
of the bridges and the inlet. To be able to set it up in a couple of hours
really highlights the strength of the technology."
The big boom in the telecommunications industries a couple of years back resulted
in an immense amount of backbone capacity to be built, much of which is currently
unused. Unfortunately, the speculative bubble burst before we ended up with
a fibre-optic port in every building. It's the so-called last-mile connection
from the pipeline to the people that is still lacking. For the telecom industry,
says Irvin, "It's a different world right now. There's not going to be
a major deployment of fibre in the last mile until someone needs it. Nobody's
going to deploy anything until they sign a contract to pay for that bill.
And therein lies the market opportunity [for fSONA]. The product we have now
is basically a piece of virtual dark fibre. It will actually adapt the speed
of the link to anything between 1.5 gigabits all the way down to 45 megabits,
significantly higher [about 30 times faster] than T1 capacity."
Speed isn't the only reason someone might want such a system. A company might
want a network that links offices in a secure manner, without having to lease
bandwidth through existing lines. Perhaps there are no lines near enough to
use. (According to Irvin, "If someone signs up to a major fibre build,
it takes several months to get that completed, and the costs are high.")
Or there's the multibuilding campus layout favoured by academia and some industrial
companies. Another market is opening up in less-developed countries, bypassing
wired systems altogether and leaping straight into wireless technology. Additionally,
wireless systems that are radio- or microwave-based require licensing and
coordination with other users, can be susceptible to interference, and you
can only install a limited number of them in a given region. But with the
precise focus of laser beams, you can just keep lining these units up.
Irvin claims the core technologies behind his company's products have been
in use for decades, primarily in aerospace applications like earth-to-satellite
and between-satellites communications. He recently even came across the report
of a demo held at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. "The reason that we're
able to deliver such a cost-effective product nowadays is because of all of
the investments that did happen in optical technology."
He is optimistic about fSONA's growth. Alcatel, a European company specializing
in point-to-point microwave-radio networking, has signed a deal to use its
products and there are several new units scheduled to be released this year.
(The company's head office is in Richmond, while its 39-person research-and-development
department is in Los Angeles.) "We're balancing our time between the
evangelizing, I suppose, of this new technology; on the other side, we're
signing up partners. Half of the market is now onboard and looking at FSO
and comparing different systems. The other half hasn't heard of it."
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