Why wired; why not wireless?
The concept of wireless mesh networking has been around a while without exciting much interest beyond the community of wireless anoraks. Now the technology is proving to be an excellent, and cost-efficient, solution for the deployment of large scale networks in areas where cable or fibre is not available.
In a typical Wi-Fi/WLAN network users connect their laptops wirelessly to the nearest access point and in turn that access point is hardwired into the backhaul network and thence into the Internet or PSTN. In a mesh network, each access point is connected to a wireless router which hands off the signal to one or more further wireless routers before it reaches the final wired connection. Mesh networks are very reliable as each access point or node is connected to a number of other nodes and, if one node fails, the system finds an alternative route and thus maintains the communications link.
In a normal Wi-Fi/WLAN network, the failure of an access point means the complete loss of communications. Mesh networks are also very scalable as extra capacity can be provided simply by adding more nodes. The other major benefit of mesh networking is that it increases network capacity.
In a traditional wireless network, users in a particular location connect to a single access point and have to share a fixed amount of bandwidth. With mesh networking the more devices that are on the network the more bandwidth becomes available.
