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Greek island deploys wireless mesh network |
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Tuesday, 29 July 2008 |
The 3,000 plus islanders of Patmos and its thousands of visitors will soon have the convenience of island-wide free mobile networking delivered by joint venture Uni Nortel using a Nortel wireless mesh solution. Uni Nortel is a joint venture in
Greece between Nortel and Unisystems, an IT company and leading Systems Integrator. Patmos, located in the Dodecanese chain of islands in the
Aegean Sea, is a global tourist magnet. The monastery of
St. John the Theologian founded in 1088 is located on the island and is a place of pilgrimage and Greek Orthodox learning. The Nortel wireless mesh solution for Patmos - jointly developed in the Media Lab of MIT and the Nortel Solutions Interoperability Laboratory in
North Carolina - will be launched this summer to provide wireless broadband and Internet access services across the island. The network includes user-friendly hotzones and indoor Wi-Fi, all delivered with minimal capital expense using Nortel's affordable mesh technology.
The
Patmos wirefree project was initiated under the leadership of Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and former chairman of the MIT Media Lab, and Michail Bletsas while both were at the Lab. The project is being implemented by local Internet Service Provider (ISP) 12Net working with Uni Nortel which is responsible for the commissioning, design and installation of the network. Negroponte has a home on
Patmos and visits often. In the 1990s his inability to get Internet access prompted him to set up a local dialup Internet service provider - ISP 12Net. In 2001, Bletsas, then research scientist and director of computing at the Media Lab, researched the possibility of providing broadband Internet connectivity to
Patmos.
The network will deliver the benefits of broadband Internet access across the island and offer access for visitors. This will boost the island's tourist trade by providing new communications options such as the ability for visitors to keep up with news from home by watching streaming videocasts online. In the Patmos school year starting September 2008, high school teachers and students on
Patmos and its surrounding islands will be able to use the new network to access on-line educational resources. Initially the Patmos network will use eight core nodes wirelessly connected with a
Íortel
Wireless
Bridge 7230 and 50 Íortel WP7220 and WP7215 Access nodes, covering the major area of the island.
www.nortel.com |
