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The Point-to-Point of Wireless Bridging: Page 8 of 19

BitRage stresses raw performance, and the product didn't let us down. We pushed almost 78 Mbps through the unit. The CR45-A's maximum range is advertised as 11 miles with appropriate antennas, and we verified in our attenuation tests that the units perform at full speed up to their minimum receive threshold. Latency is less than 1 millisecond, making the product an excellent choice for voice, video and other delay-sensitive apps.

Management and monitoring capabilities are quite limited. You can connect to the console and list the version of the OS that the bridge is running, but that's about it. The bridge does offer telnet, but this only reports the same status information as the console. You can't even upgrade the system via software: BitRage had to send us new chips so we could upgrade the software. The unit does support SNMP, including standard MIBs, so you can connect to the bridge and see stats such as uptime or system name.

At a cost of almost $24,000, the BitRage CR45-A is almost three times as expensive as the next highest-priced unit. For this extra cost, you get a high-performance, low-latency radio system.

CR45-A-53 DS3 Radio and IU45-E AC with Ethernet Bridge, $23,900 ($11,950 per bridge/protocol translator), BitRage, (888) 808-8169, (904) 808-0656. www.bitrage.com

Airaya corp. AI108-1-050