Lower Manhattan To Get Ultra High-Speed Wireless Network

GigaBeam Corporation has inked a deal with The Hub at Sixth and New York real estate firm the Rudin Management Company to deploy an ultra high speed wireless network in lower Manhattan.

Under the agreement, The Hub at Sixth, a carrier-neutral co-location and interconnection facility set up in downtown New York by Rudin Management in 2000, will use GigaBeam's technology to deploy a "virtual fiber" wireless metropolitan area network serving Rudin's tenants, carriers and other enterprises. The network will be an alternative to the terrestrial MAN, offering easy deployment without the expense and effort of laying cable with, according to the partners, the reliability of traditional networks.

"GigaBeam's technology will enable true alternative access, which previously was unavailable from the existing terrestrial fiber services," Rudin Management's Executive Vice President and COO John Gilbert said in a statement. "This problem was highlighted in a report by the Lower Manhattan Telecom User's Working Group following the network outages caused by 9/11. Also, our tenants and others will be able to use GigaBeam's virtual fiber wireless links for reliable connectivity at beyond broadband speeds."

GigaBeam's point-to-point wireless system employs very high frequency signals at 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz to transmit data at multi-gigabit-per-second speeds. Combined with the availability of large blocks of the radio spectrum recently authorized by the FCC for commercial use, GigaBeam's technology can transmit at these rates using Gigabit Ethernet protocols. The company plans to raise the bandwidth bar by unveiling 10 gigabit wireless products in 2005.