High-Speed Wireless Ethernet Bridge

A newindoor/outdoor GhostBridge Wireless Ethernet Bridgefrom B&B Electronics Mfg. offers a line-of-sight range of up to 15km and 5GHz performance. Used for cable replacements or extensions, it can create atransparent, secure, high-speed (up to 150 Mbps) point-to-point link betweentwo remote devices or networks, eliminating up to 15 km of expensive anddamage-prone wiring.

"We have a variety of customers that need to do cablereplacements or extensions for Ethernet to link together remote sites, supportmobile devices, overcome physical obstacles or address cabling reliabilityproblems," says Mike Fahrion, director of engineering for B&B."Historically, our only solution for these applications has been based onproprietary RF communications which can provide up to a 1 MBaud link but tendsto be expensive and relies on low-volume, niche market radios."

With the advent of the 802.11n version, backed by hundredsof millions of dollars of R&D invested in developing these chipsets, theperformance of the system compared to 900 MHz solutions is considerable, alongwith increases in reliability and range by jumping to standards-basedtechnology.

"With this new product we wanted to leverage the latesttechnology and focus on ease of use," Fahrion says. "We factory pre-configurethe units into a secure bridge mode instead of having the user wade throughdozens of access point/router network configuration fields required by most802.11-based products."

Fahrion says that most customers either don't have theexpertise or don't want to spend the time configuring, so the goal was to takethe chipsets and pre-configure the system to create an out-of-the-box,point-and-play experience with no configuration required. "There is no disk,driver or Web server setup required. You take the unit out of the box, plug itin and you've got a link," he says.

Another place where users can get into trouble with wirelessis on the antenna side. Even if a user takes an access point and goes throughall of the settings to turn it into a bridge, the next problem is how to makethe antennas work. With GhostBridge, the antenna is fully integrated andfunctions as a sector antenna since the unit isn't designed to be an accesspoint. With the goal of providing a solution for cable replacement or extensions,the integrated sector antenna makes the unit user-friendly in terms of mountingand pointing. It can be easily attached to a pole and pointed at the other enduntil signal strength lights show a link. In less than 20 seconds, the unitswill automatically pair up and there is a working Ethernet link.

The 80-degree, 15dBi sector antenna isintegrated into the housing of the unit. A 5 GHz radio built from the 802.11n2x2 MIMO technology provides the long-range (up to 15km) connectivity betweenremote stations and a central office. Or users can bridge two networks orhard-to-reach nodes together. The operating frequency is 5,470 - 5,825 GHz, andthe unit consumes 8W maximum power.

The package, available for $599,contains two GhostBridge wireless Ethernet bridges (a base station and a node),two ac PoE adapters with power cords, two dc PoE adapters with barrel plugadapters and four cable ties to secure the units.