Motorola Canopy Wireless Broadband, System Overview

Canopy Wireless Broadband

Motorola’s new wireless broadband offering, the Canopy™ system makes delivering low-cost broadband wireless Internet to consumers and businesses alike faster and easier than ever before.

That’s because the Motorola Canopy Broadband Wireless Internet Platform solution is easily deployed and extremely cost-effective, so service providers can focus on delivering high-speed, high-quality service to their customers.

Motorola Canopy™ is currently deployed in many countries and is available in various frequencies to suit your regional needs.

The Canopy System

The Motorola Canopy Wireless system provides cost-effective high-speed Internet access to residential and business customers alike. The Canopy family of products can help service providers deliver broadband service to local customers as well as improve the utilization of their existing network.

The Canopy broadband wireless platform is highly scaleable and exhibits low susceptibility to interference requiring no elaborate frequency planning and coordination. The Canopy hardware draws little power and its packaging is unobtrusive. The equipment uses antennas of only moderate gain resulting in minimal requirements for aiming the units. Hence, installation is easy, in contrast to many of the higher frequency solutions currently available. Finally, the built-in visual feedback installation indicators allow the unit to be installed by virtually anyone. These characteristics facilitate initial deployment and network expansion as capacity needs increase. Figure 2 illustrates how the Canopy system with its simple equipment makes it easy to build your own Internet access network.

Figure1. Canopy Wireless System

As shown, the system has application for serving enterprise properties, such as schools, municipalities, hospitals and small business campuses. It is also an excellent system for serving residential single family and multi-family housing units with users experiencing data rates in excess of 6 Mpbs per subscriber. The Canopy Wireless system enables broadband access deployment with a wireless point of presence that can be connected directly to broadband infrastructure or indirectly via a wireless backhaul link to fiber or microwave network infrastructure. Figures 2 and 3 depict Canopy in its various configurations (point-to-multipoint and a point-to-point configuration).

Figure 2. Canopy Technology in a Point-to-Multipoint Configuration

A wireless access point can contain anywhere from one to six Canopy sector transceiver(s). Each transceiver delivers 10 Mbps connectivity with up to 200 subscribers per sector, ensuring omnidirectional coverage within a two-mile radius. Six transceivers have an aggregate capacity of 60 Mbps.

To increase capacity beyond 60 Mbps, additional transceivers can be easily co-located on an access point resulting in up to 12 overlapping sectors for aggregate data rates up to 120 Mbps. Transceivers interface with the network infrastructure routers and the subscriber computers via 10 or 100 baseT auto sensed Ethernet.

Figure 3. Canopy Technology in a Point-to-Point Configuration

Bandwidth efficiency is achieved using a proprietary, exceedingly robust modulation scheme that allows for superior co-channel performance and mitigation of interference from other systems operating in the same frequency bands.

Canopy systems are engineered to compensate for the propagation problems associated with common variations in weather such as rain, fog or snow. These problems largely affect the operation of numerous more expensive high bandwidth systems that utilize upper microwave spectrum.

Benefits of the Canopy Wireless System

• The Motorola Canopy Wireless Internet Platform delivers a telecommunications link that supports high speed data throughputs while requiring significantly reduced capital investments and lower deployment costs than other broadband technologies. Benefits include:
• Reliability and Availability – The Canopy system is designed around the philosophy of inexpensive hardware with redundancy where needed. This allows the Canopy system to be a very cost-effective yet highly reliable/available solution.
• Quality of Service and Capacity -- Ensuring that bandwidth is available for a range of data services to all subscribers is an essential requirement. The interference rejection characteristics of our system allow Motorola to provide aggregate system capacities that are far greater than the signaling rates alone might indicate.
• Security and Authentication – Privacy and integrity of data are key considerations of broadband subscribers. Security and authentication to prevent unwanted access to critical data or services are necessary for any broadband system. Canopy uses industry proven authentication and encryption technologies to ensure that the service provider maintains control of the network.
• Mitigation of Interference – As wireless broadband services become more widespread and unlicensed spectrum becomes more crowded coexistence or mitigation of signal interference becomes a greater consideration. The underlying modulation scheme used by the Canopy system provides one of the best interference rejection systems available and far surpasses the performance of competing technologies in the unlicensed band.
• Reduced Installation & Deployment Costs and Time -- Network service providers have faced significant challenges in reducing wiring and installation costs in deploying complex systems. The Canopy technology easily supports network configuration changes on either a permanent or temporary basis.
• Reduced Customer Support Costs -- Service outages and customer calls can rapidly drive-up operating costs. Canopy utilizes effective network management tools and detects system outages to minimize these costs.