SkyPipes has successfully conducted a "proof-of-physics" test in Granite Bay, California. This test proved that a preliminary design of our steerable beam antennas using commodity WiFi 802.11g radios could sustain full throughputs of 36 Mbps with one-way UDP packet traffic streams for weeks at time. The test was conducted continuously over a three week period with a maximum distance between nodes of 1/2 mile, through foliage, and through several days of rain. Interference was experienced from as many as eight WiFi access point radios in homes located between the test nodes but did not have any impact on the throughput of the nodes under test. Since these tests were conducted, the next generation of WiFi radios have come on the market. These radios use three antenna connections to digitally remove noise from received signals and increase the performance of basic WiFi ten-fold in terms of throughput for up to 300 Mbps between radios. Effective distance between radios is often doubled or trippled over the earlier generation. We have modifed our basic stearable beam antenna design to simultaneously switch three separate beams in any desired direction. This multiplies all of the advantages of our switched grid network technology times the throughput imporvements of the new 802.11n MIMO radio technology.

These results have given us the confidence to refine our final design and move it into volume production.

The production design will use 802.11n radios with twice the transmit power as that used in the test nodes as well as benefiting from our new enhanced MIMObeam™ antenna design. We expect these improvements to increase the practical distance between nodes to as much as 2 to 3 miles and the actual sustained throughputs between node pairs to acheive100 to 200 Mbps.