The citizens of Mumbai, India may soon be blessed with a wireless mesh network that should blanket the city. And although Lifestyle Networks and its managing director, Abhishek Javeri, are behind this development, Mumbai’s citizens will also owe a thank-you to Google.
Google, according to Light Reading’s Ray Le Maistre, “comes into play . . . in the network planning.” For optimal efficiency, Javeri and his team “used the Google mapping service to work out where the radios should be positioned so that the whole city can be covered with a signal . . . .” Yet Javeri didn’t exactly sit at his computer and type in random addresses to achieve this even spread.
“LifeStyle’s team has input the GPS . . . coordinates of the network’s nodes into the individual radios, which in turn feed data into the Google application to create an online network map for the company to use,” reported Maistre. The point of this? “Javeri says he can see which nodes are live, how those nodes are connected, and even whether a single radio in a network node is operational or not.”
Considering that this “optimized” network will still cost between $46 and $58 million, it’s scary to think how much money might have been wasted (and what sort of spotty coverage might have nonetheless resulted) had Javeri gone with a more traditional setup.
Once other companies get wind of this idea, they’re sure to embrace it; in fact, as GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher notes, the strategy is already spreading.
