Proxim offers 30meg/sec wireless to my granny in Renfrew

My grandmother lives in Renfrew, Scotland.

Renfrew is distinguished not only by a huge amount of history and a lot of ye olde Scottish architecture, but also by the fact that it’s the nearest ‘town’ for Glasgow Airport. Renfrew, more or less, *is* Glasgow Airport.

So this makes visiting Gran relatively straight forward, provided you can get a flight into Glasgow.

And all the more efficient too, with news that Proxim and their Paisley-based integrator, CXS, has knocked up a wireless network covering the town. In fact it stretches 12 kilometers, which covers around 2,600 households and, provided my Renfrew geography is still accurate, one of them is Gran’s place. I shall have to check for a WiFi signal the next time I’m up. It’s all part of a Digital Inclusion Project implemented by Renfrewshire Council.

Here’s the meat from the release:

Renfrewshire Council was looking for a sustainable solution to provide citizens with residential high speed broadband. The programme, called Digital Inclusion Project, was designed to cover an area of around 5 square kilometers. Responses to the council’s tender included broadband vendors offering hard-wired solutions. CXS, however, put forward a proposal for a wireless solution, which was 1/10th the cost of hard-wired solutions. Having reviewed proposals, the council decided to work with CXS due to the
economic advantages of the wireless solution compared to fixed line proposals suggested by other vendors.

The implementation called for a large and robust network. CXS delivered by using 70 Proxim AP-4000MRs to cover over 2,600 households and 25 point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links (utilizing 40 Proxim Tsunami MP.11s) for backhaul to a 30Mbps internet ‘pipe’. The 30Mbps wireless backhaul extends over 12 kilometers from Johnstone in Renfrewshire to Shortroods at Glasgow Airport.

So strictly speaking, Gran won’t be connecting at 30 meg a second. Actually, she won’t be connecting at all, if I’m honest. I think she’s quite content with television. Although it might make the possibility of getting her a wireless Flickr-powered photo frame a reality. However I imagine residents in the signal area should get a pretty decent service.