July 5, 2006 Herndon, VA -- GigaBeam Corp. today announced that it has received an order for additional 30 'WiFiber' wireless fiber links from CircleTel Consultancies (CircleTel), its Middle East and North African (MENA) distributor.
"GigaBeam's WiFiber continues to achieve market acceptance in the MENA region," reports Nasr Talat Nasr, chairman of CircleTel. "We are confident that GigaBeam products will gain further market traction in our region. We are seeing growing demand for GigaBeam's technology from diverse sectors, including government, finance, security and surveillance, enterprise, and education," he says.
"We have been thrilled with the success of WiFiber in the MENA region," adds Lou Slaughter, GigaBeam's chairman and CEO. "GigaBeam's WiFiber enables rapid installation of a fiber-equivalent-speed network without the delays and cost normally associated with installing terrestrial fiber."
GigaBeam WiFiber products operate in the 71- to 76-GHz and 81- to 86-GHz radio spectrum bands, a portion of the radio frequency spectrum that has been authorized by the Federal Communications Commission for wireless point-to-point commercial use.
GigaBeam's technology, utilizing these large blocks of authorized contiguous spectrum, enables multi-Gigabit-per-second communications through use of Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and other standard protocols. The current speed achieved by GigaBeam's WiFiber G-1.25 product series is full duplex at 1 Gbit/sec (equivalent to 647 T1 lines or 1,000 DSL connections), which supports GbE protocol.
GigaBeam recently announced its WiFiber G-2.7 series, to be released in Q3, 2006, which will operate at 2.7 Gbits/sec. The protocols supported by the G-2.7 product series include 2 x GbE (2 x 1 Gbit/sec); OC-48 / STM-16 (2.488 Gbits/sec); SMPTE 292M (1.485 Gbits/sec) and both 1- and 2-Gbit/sec fiber channel. GigaBeam also plans deployment of future products capable of 10 Gbits/sec utilizing either the 10-GbE or OC-192 protocol standards.
GigaBeam's WiFiber technology is similar to terrestrial fiber in terms of speed and reliability for deployment in metro networks, say company representatives. However, WiFiber has a substantial advantage over terrestrial fiber because WiFiber can be deployed in a day and costs less to deploy than terrestrial fiber. Terrestrial fiber can take months to deploy and also requires significant regulatory and environmental approvals prior to installation.