Zhone Technologies has crafted what it says is a solution to faltering municipal wireless networks: add more wires.

Zhone's SkyZhone outdoor Wi-Fi node is the first to make use of high-throughput 802.11n chips for a more consistent and resilient signal. But the real key is SkyZhone's use for backhaul of copper DSL lines, which also bring electrical power to the node. The result is a Wi-Fi node that is much easier to deploy and results in a wireless LAN with much higher aggregate capacity than existing mesh products, the company says.

Founded in 1999, Zhone specializes in central office and customer premises gear that supports a variety of broadband access services over fiber and copper. With SkyZhone, the company is adding Wi-Fi access to its product mix, without requiring network operators also to deploy a wireless backhaul infrastructure to support the access nodes.

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"The goal is creating metro Wi-Fi networks as an extension of the [operator's existing] multi-service architecture," says Steve Glapa, vice president of marketing for Zhone.

"By leveraging DSL backhaul and power, they're saying [to customers] 'here's how we can keep costs down,'" says Peter Jarich, a research director with Current Analysis, a competitive analysis firm. "You end up with something that can make sense in terms of a business case [for metro wireless networks]."

Jarich says that some other vendors are tackling the same broad set of problems, such as Cisco with ServiceMesh  architecture, a group of integrated Cisco products, including its Wi-Fi gear, designed for service providers.

Existing outdoor Wi-Fi products come from a wide range of companies, such as Cisco and Nortel, and a flock of much smaller, recent entrants such as BelAir, Firetide, SkyPilot, Strix and Tropos. But the municipal networks deploying these products are a mixed bag. There have been a string of high-profile problems and outright failures over the past year, for a variety of interrelated reasons: problematic business plan, higher than expected capital costs, weak or unreliable access signals, low overall performance, deployment complexities, painfully slow growth in subscribers.

The SkyZhone outdoor node seems to be the first such product to use an 802.11n radio chipset, from Broadcom, offering a data rate of about 300Mbps in both the unlicensed 2.4GHz and the licensed 4.9GHz public safety bands, with a multi-antenna (MIMO) array. Other vendors have used multiple-antenna systems, but SkyZhone seems to be the first to do so with 11n in a product aimed at this market. The SkyZhone node also includes a powered Ethernet port, into which peripherals such as a video camera can be plugged, without the need for a separate power source.