Flarion hits the road with mobile mobile demo

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Mar 13, 2002

Flarion Technologies is demonstrating a true broadband experience for mobile users in major cities throughout the USA.

Flarion Technologies is demonstrating a true broadband experience for mobile users in major cities to network operators, government officials, analysts, journalists, and companies interested in becoming flash-OFDM alliance members.

Using a cell-on-light-truck known as a COLT, which is equipped with two basestations and an IP network, Flarion can drive from city to city and demonstrate mobile access to popular business and consumer applications, such as virtual private network (VPN), voice over IP (VoIP), multimedia streaming, online gaming, Internet protocol (IP) video/camera feed using Ricoh's RDC-i700 wireless digital camera, instant messaging and web browsing.

The Flarion basestation serves Flarion wireless modems that are plugged into standard digital video cameras, laptops and PDAs.

"With our COLT, we have mobilised Flarion's flash-OFDM network to bring always-on broadband speed and user experience to any doorstep in America", said Flarion's vice president of business development and marketing, Peter Carson.

"When participants plug our wireless modem into their laptops or PDAs, they are not only amazed by the data speed and response time of our system, but how we transparently make their entire suite of existing IP applications move.

They also see a world of possibilities and new applications that were previously untenable due to inadequate network response times".

To date, Flarion has successfully demonstrated mobile broadband with the COLT in New York and Washington DC.

The Flarion COLT will next travel onto Orlando, Florida to showcase the flash-OFDM system at the CTIA Wireless 2002 trade show on 18th-20th March.

After CTIA, Flarion's COLT will visit cities including Atlanta, Boston, San Jose, Kansas City, Seattle and San Diego.

Flarion has an FCC trial license for the 700MHz frequency band and is building commercial products for the 800 and 1900MHz cellular frequencies.

Its flash-OFDM technology offers users burst data rates of 3Mbit/s and datarates of 384Kbit/s at the edge of a cell.

The system's quality of service (QoS) feature allows service providers to offer flat rate pricing for tiered classes of service, enabling licensed operators worldwide the ability to offer profitable mobile data services to multiple customer segments, including the most demanding business users.