| By samc on City Clouds The City of Taipei which is building a huge, city-wide mesh network that covers some 90% of their 2.6 million population, is now looking into a WiMax overlay, reports the Taipei Times. Meanwhile, Vivato and TW-Airnet announced they are installing 42 Vivato Base Stations throughout major cities in Taiwan, including Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung for extended "hot zones". Dr Ying-Jeou Ma, the mayor of the Taiwanese capital (above), said he hopes to see Taipei become the "first seamless and wireless city". The WiMax trial is scheduled to begin this year in Taipei, according to Anand Chandrasekhar, vice president and director of Intel's sales and marketing group, speaking during a conference call last week. Meanwhile, TW-Airnet will start building the Vivato hotzones in the top 5 cities in Taiwan, where they have access to over 2,200 pre-selected sites and roof tops for installation of the Vivato base stations. Each of the 5 cities will have an initial hot zone of approximately 8 sq. miles each, and will serve both mobile and stationary customers. TW-Airnet will also provide customer premise equipment for resident and business customers. "Providing this wireless broadband technology to our citizens will dramatically change the way they work, play and communicate," said Liang CHEN, Executive VP at TW-Airnet. "This is a major event in Taiwan since there is limited broadband Internet access available today." Vivato uses phased array antennas with a patented PacketSteering technology (pdf), said to boost coverage up to 12 times that of competing Wi-Fi systems. For the initial phase of the deployment in Taiwan, the coverage area is over 40 sq. miles, which would have required hundreds of mesh access points. "Using an ordinary mesh access point system, we would have spent twice as much money on equipment, and much more on operating the network," said Jim YU, General Manager at Chu-I Enterprise. But don't discount mesh just yet.  Nortel is building a huge, city-wide mesh network in Taipei. Nortel's Wireless Mesh Network Solution will be used. Taipei plans to make wireless internet access available everywhere in the Taiwan capital by the end of 2005, joining a small number of cities offering Wi-Fi networks. HP has won the contract to reach almost 90 per cent of the capital's population of three million, a project coordinator said on Friday. "In most cities in the world the coverage is small, but Taipei's [network] is designed for a population of 2.6 million," said Andy Lai, project leader for a Hewlett-Packard consulting team working with the Taipei City Government. Taiwan's Q-Ware, which won Taipei's tender to build the network, plans to spend $70m on infrastructure, setting up 15,000 to 20,000 access points around the city, according to HP. Q-Ware will charge users for access. HP will work with Intel, Microsoft and Cisco Systems to implement the "M-City" project. Q-Ware Corp, the winner of the M-City BOT project, plans to invest US$70 million in the next eight years for infrastructure construction. Taipei's huge wireless mesh network is expected to encompass 10,000 wireless access points by year-end 2005 and serve an area of 272 square kilometers, where 90% of Taipei's 2.65 million people live. In phase one, some 30 transit stations in northern Taipei became the epicenters of the wireless broadband network. In phase two of the plan, some 50 percent of Taipei households were anticipated to have wireless coverage by June of 2005. Finally phase three of the plan will be targeted for December of 2005, as wireless access will eventually be available for 90 percent of Taipei households. Nortel has also completed a WiFi/cellular handoff trial with a Japanese network operator demonstrating seamless and secure roaming and hand-off between 3G cellular and Wi-Fi networks. Just how the frequency coordination of these competing unlicensed 2.4 GHz hotspots is going to work is unclear. DailyWireless has more on Nortel's city-wide mesh network, Taipei Unwired, WiFi/Cellular Roaming Overview, Vivato Tri-Mode, Pronto On The Line, Vivato Unwires Sarasota, VeriLAN Gets IEEE Contract and Texas-Size Clouds. | 
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