Hi all,
A few years ago, I was invited to serve on BITAG – the Broadband Infrastructure Technology Advisory Group. BITAG (www.bitag.org) is a group of engineers from multiple technology companies, carriers, public interest groups and educational institutions. The primary purpose of BITAG is to produce very detailed documents about complex issues in broadband that can then be used to educate policy makers about technical considerations.
BITAG released its latest report on “Differentiated Treatment of Internet Traffic”, which goes into intense detail on how network traffic differentiation works and what its impacts are on network performance and management. Here is a link to the report:
http://www.bitag.org/report-differentiated-treatment-of-internet-traffic.php
Pages 20 and 21 focus on Fixed Wireless Network Architecture, and as I am the only WISP in the group, it was the portion I was asked to focus on. It is short, but I think it does a good job of describing how WISP networks are put together and the impact differentiation can have on their performance. Members of this list are intimately familiar with how our networks are built, but our methods of deployment are far outside what is considered to be the common practice. This is the first time that a BITAG paper has had a section referring to WISPs, and I am very happy that we were able to get equal billing with all of the other forms of broadband access.
There is a lot of good material in here. To be honest, a lot of it is over my head, but I learned in the process of putting this document together and you will too if you take some time to read it.
BTW, special thanks go to WISPA for helping sponsor my participation in BITAG.