Managing the Mesh

It’s not enough to setup a city-wide, Wi-Fi-based, mesh network. You have to keep track of it. That’s why companies that make the equipment, like Tropos Networks and SkyPilot Networks, are announcing partnerships with companies that can keep track of the traffic they generate.

Tropos is partnering with NetNearU (NNU). The NNU TRACKOS management platform has already been deployed with some Tropos networks, including the big setups in Anaheim, California, and the Philadelphia network being installed now.  The two made official this week a joint marketing agreement to push each other’s solutions.

Both the above networks are operated by EarthLink, which announced today that it has launched its second market in California, in the south-of-the-bay city of Milpitas in Santa Clara county. Tropos is EarthLink’s preferred provider of mesh equipment, but no word on whether they’re using TRACKOS in Milpitas as well.

NNU is now a Tropos MetroMesh Solution Partner. It describes TRACKOS as providing “real-time end-user self provisioning, authentication, billing, roaming support, network operability monitoring, configuration, reporting and more.”

Similarly, SkyPilot is working with Procera Networks to jointly develop new capabilities that will come from using Procera’s PacketLogic traffic and bandwidth management appliance platforms. New features will include application prioritization and advanced statistics collection for future study and network enhancement. The two companies also say they’ve got several common customers, which proved the two solutions worked together well enough to make this partnership a no-brainer. Those customers include Spain’s Bamboo Telecom and Australia’s McKay Computing.