Crab Net, Intelligent Design in WiFi
We have been working in the field of Internet service since 1993. Our founder has been involved with the Internet since 1985, before it was available to the general public. This has given us the perspective need to distinguish what are the most effective technologies to provide the best quality networks. The networks we employ are practical, but we use technology that is poised for growth. Our mission is to create easy to use reliable wireless networks in large and small spaces. This last point is key. We believe that network should be flexible enough to grow even to a region. Our design supports growing the composite network to a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), while maintaining an easy to use, secure network.
We use mesh networking in our application development to help remote devices to stay connected to the network. Mesh networking already provides many improvements to connecting to the Internet. We are working to improve on mesh networking in areas of particular interest to our projects.
The Challenge
Creating a high quality wireless network poses many challenges, eliminating dead zones, getting a good signal in an already urban environments that are already saturated with signal, while making your network easy to access and maintain an uninterrupted signal.
People either put up multiple independent routers or use WDS to extend their main router. This leads to people constantly switching LANs in some cases or greatly attenuating the speed of their Internet through the use of repeaters (WDS). A mesh network makes one seamless, self healing mesh network.
WiFi operates at frequencies that do not penetrate solid objects well. This creates challenges like dead spaces.
The spectrum used by WiFi is usable by anyone for any purpose provided they comply with transmit power limitations. The challenge in this case is noise.
Multiple WiFi Access Points
A solution most people employ is to deploy more WiFi access points. If those access points are independent people are constantly needing to switch connected access points as they move withing the space. This interrupts sessions online.
WDS
The other solution commonly employed is to create one network through a more primitive means of extending the network called WDS (Wireless Distribution Service) First, a Standard has never been established for WDS, so routers from different manufacturers are not compatible. In addition, it divides the bandwidth in half to accomplish the extension of the network, so each hop decreases bandwidth.
Power
More powerful transmitters and antennas can create a stronger signal to cover larger areas.
Antennas amplify signal by focusing the signal. A long omnidirectional antenna focuses the signal vertically to a narrow angle of radiation. A solution of this nature will only work well for providing service on one floor. Other antennas focus the signal vertically and horizontally. Shaping the signal has many uses and benefits. They also create some challenges.
Phase
As the frequencies used in WiFi do not pass solid objects well they are reflected. Reflected signals are out of phase, noise. On of the benefits of MIMO is, it uses out of phase signals to reassemble the composite of out of all signals to create a cleaner signal than before. Since in almost all scenarios we have reflected, out of phase signals., MIMO is an important addition to the tool-set for high quality wireless
Mesh Networking
Traditional WiFi networks operate in a star topology (Infrastructure mode). Mesh networks operate in ad-hoc mode. Each node in a mesh network can communicate directly with other nodes rather than going first through a center point. Each node on the network may have more than one connection to other nodes on the network. In addition meshed nodes typically have two or more, help the node shape traffic minimizing congestion. Nodes that have more than one connection to other nodes are fault tolerant. If one node goes down they route traffic through another node.
One Seamless WiFi Over Large Spaces
Many people have the challenge of connecting to WiFi in zone of a large space. The solutions typically employed are messy and inefficient. We make one seamless, self healing mesh network. When we deploy mesh networking in a building or campus we design it to grow with the advances we make in networking. As your needs evolve, the network, as we design it, will expand to serve those needs. We find advanced networking very interesting. We incorporate the best innovations into our networks to achieve our goals of reliability, easy of use, speed and security. The platform we use allows us to offer those advances to the wider community, whether it be a small office a large campus or even a home or residential building.
As we grow, the potential to create a robust Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) can become a reality. We will help you take advantage of that in it's early stages. MANs of this nature already exist. They are most popular in Europe, with limited popularity in the US. Our installations employ that technology. It is our belief that, for a Wireless Mesh Network to be the compelling option for a MAN there are features, not yet employed, that are needed. One key feature is Private Key Encryption at the client end. This solution must require no attention from the user. You already employ similar methods in the things you use every day. Our "best practices" solution (future feature) uses Google Key Transparency, and maintains backward compatibility to traditional authentication methods.
Features of Our Network
Robust routing with trusted nodes.
Node properties are isolated into a single node description
Propagation of signed (RSA2048) node description once and then referenced via it's hash.
Authenticated node Identities
Ownership proving (crypto-generated) IPv6 addresses
Secure routing against untrusted nodes
Capacity and interface aware routing metric.