Airvine WaveTunnel Intro

Welcome my name is Dave Sumi and I am Vice President of Marketing for Airvine.

Today in this video we are going to take you at a warp speed review of the high points of Airvine, the problem we’re solving in the market, the product, the use cases, and a summary wrapping it all together.

Chapter one who are we and the problem we are solving – The Airvine story. Basically, if you look at networking, indoor Enterprise networking, and you look at the wireless aspect of that, there has not been a significant introduction of new technology since Wi-Fi became popular in the 90’s.

What we have found is that in addition to Wi-Fi and the benefits that you get from that wireless approach, wireless ethernet backbones can also significantly enable and simplify your deployment.

As your ethernet backbone needs upgrading, as you need to extend it and move it around, nobody’s tried to tackle this from a wireless perspective until Airvine.

The use cases for these we’ll cover in greater detail. In building backhaul, IoT, network surveillance and security, temporary events–it’s almost unlimited the number of ways that you can use an ethernet backbone with wireless.

Founded in 2017 headquartered in Santa Clara that’s Airvine. What are the use cases and value prop? Very simply these are the top ones that we’ve identified so far. Although as I mentioned this can be used in a multitude of applications in enterprise use cases.

Mult-family, MDUs, apartments–your cable that was put in, that Cat5 10 years ago 20 years ago is no longer sufficient to support the applications people are using today. And doing the construction to run conduit and new wiring is expensive and intrusive to your residents.

Hospitality — similar story, except these are people who are only staying for a day. Whereas you used to check into your hotel room and you would plug your ethernet cable into your laptop, today you check into your hotel room and you turn on your four or five devices and connect them to the network. All of this is putting strain and demand on the (wireless) network that it was never designed for.

The industrial market. Factories and warehouses have large spaces to be covered they’re using private 5G they’re using Wi-Fi, but all of these small cells need to be connected. These factories and warehouses are running 24×7, they do not have any downtime allowed at all, and if you’re going to try and run new conduit and cabling through an active industrial site you’re going to run into problems.

Large public venues. Arenas, stadiums, these venues often have multiple events over series of days that have different requirements for that ethernet backbone. The point of sale, the cameras, the layout are all different for each event and with a wired approach, this can be time consuming and a major headache.

So that’s it those are the major areas. Next up: the product. The product is the WaveTunnel. Our WaveTunnel is a 60 GHz product that does something no one has ever done before. We are non-line-of-sight (NLOS). Our WaveTunnel will go through your office walls, your sheetrock, your glass, your wood, and provide a multi-gigabit connection. In addition as we’ll show a little bit later the product has 90 degree beam steering: we can go around corners. Which means deploying the WaveTunnel is extremely simple. You take these units which are typically mounted on the ceiling, you preconfigure them, they automatically connect, and your network is up and running.

It provides virtual and physical network segmentation, securing sensitive assets, security, IoT devices, and there’s virtually no construction whatsoever.

The entire product, the WaveTunnel system, is powered by VineSuite. What is Vine Suite? That sounds like a very interesting name. Well it is composed of four major components.

1) Our VineOS which is the underlying OS that allows the units to connect, it provides our ring resiliency amongst another host of features that we deliver
2) We have VineManager, which is a web interface that you use to control, monitor and manage the the WaveTunnel network.
3) And we have AirvineMobile, which is used for initial configuration. It’s a smartphone app that you download for Google Play or the Apple app store. Configure the units, mount them on the ceiling and away you go.
4) VineIQ is our intelligent agent that will be released later in 2024, and this as many people are doing today, monitors the complete Network in real time; adjusting, optimizing overall Network performance, watching for security and suspicious behavior on the network, and in many cases allowing the company to upsell. We can monitor the network see where congestion is happening and we can reach out proactively to our customers and say, ‘Hey you might need a little more capacity over here,’ or ,’Hey you might want to consider moving your access point over here.’ All of that is done with the VineIQ.

How do you deploy the WaveTunnel? Well first of all you can do what we call a spur, or a point to point to point. Each WaveTunnel node has two radios in it: one going upstream and one going downstream. One of these nodes in a point to point to point (and there’s no limit to how many points you can go only limited by the latency required for your application), is connected to the WAN–it could be the root node as shown here, it could be node one, it could be node two, anywhere along this this stretch of point-to-point links you could have the connection to your WAN.

When the units are configured on the bench and then mounted, they automatically connect. Node one may have a Wi-Fi access point powered by one our four PoE ports on the WaveTunnel nodes. On another node you may have an IP camera. On another node you may have IoT. There’s nothing–there’s no limitation to the devices that you can connect to a WaveTunnel node, it just needs an ethernet connection and we’ll backhaul that traffic.

Some of the cool ways that you can deploy the WaveTunnel? Well we can go around corners. Now, how many 60 GHz ethernet wireless backbones do you know of? None I know the answer, because we’re the only one, that can go around corners.

You can see the node at the top is shooting down the corridor towards the one in the corner, which is offset at a 45 degree, so you have a 45 degree angle coming in, and another 45 degree angle coming out, effectively giving you a 90 degree bend around those corners. And just for graphical accuracy you can see that there are Wi-Fi access points connected to each of the nodes.

This allows our system to go around corners, and when going around a corner is not viable you can go through the walls.

Next a couple of very quick use cases and again the applications on where you can use this high capacity wireless ethernet backbone are limited only by your imagination. So we’re only going to talk about two use cases today.

The first connecting a warehouse or a big box store using cable versus the WaveTunnel. What we’re trying to do here the project and this was a real project 250 stores each measuring 300 ft by 100 ft. The desire by the customer was to add four Wi-Fi access points across the building and tie them back into the head end they wanted to deploy new access points with higher capacities and better performance to replace existing ones that were no longer providing the coverage they needed. The work can only be done in the off hours, not when customers are around. And if you’re going to go do this particular project with cable, it’s going to cost you roughly $25 to $30,000 per store to do this. You’re going to string those cables along the ceiling where the access points are going to be deployed. You’re going to have to renter scissor lift. You’re going to mount the access points you’re going to string cable which means you’re going to be constantly moving that scissor lift along as you move the cable and mount it again and again and again. Estimation 4 days per store.

Using the WaveTunnel the cost is going to be roughly $15,000 to 417,000 labor, plus the WaveTunnels. There are no cables involved. You plug the units in, you mount the access point and the WaveTunnel at the same time in the same location one scissor lift goes up you mount everything you bring the scissor lift down you go do the other three nodes no professional skills needed and if you like you can deploy them in a ring for resiliency estimated time per store one day. When we look at this entire project we’re estimating $75 million dollars, and a th000 m dayss if you’re going to do this with Cat 5 and conduit versus 3.75 million or roughly half and one quarter of the Mand dayss using the WaveTunnel approach pretty compelling but don’t rely on us bring your project in and we’ll take a look and we’ll give you an idea of how much time and money we can save you.

Let’s move on to our second WaveTunnel use case. The project: a hotel upgrade, connecting 32 Wi-Fi access points across a hotel floor, and there are five floors into a headend. If you look at the wired solution on the right hand, side you can see there’s a a wiring closet where the MDF resides. The HVAC must be provided to keep that closet and the equipment cool, and from there, from those MDF switches, you reach out a wire to every one of these hotel rooms. You can see the wiring gets a little bit complex. If you look at the diagram on the left, there’s no there’s no HVAC required because there are no MDFs, because there is no room that needs to keep the switches cool. Each WaveTunnel node is a switch in and of itself. You can think of this as a little bit like a distributed idea.

So let’s look at the comparison. Cable labor cost: four man weeks. Almost a mile worth of cable required to do this per floor requires the cable to be run in conduit or above the ceilings. And there are optical components to connect the MDF to the IDF fiber.

If you go with the WaveTunnel approach the labor cost is one man week. There’s no MDF, there’s no HVAC for the wiring closet, there’s no professional skills, and you’re going to save roughly 128 men hours of labor. In addition, from a scheduling and project perspective, once again you’re going to be able to install those access points and the WaveTunnel at the same time. Net net: $720,000 labor cost for the cable over five weeks vs. The WaveTunnel approach, $180,000 in labor cost in one week.

So wrapping up our warp speed view of Airline and the WaveTunnel. You can see we have WaveTunnel nodes in a ring, in point to points, and they’re all being powered by VineSuite. Local area networks traditionally have always been cable. No one has ever tried to do a wireless backbone indoor with enterprises before, primarily because because the products did not have the capacity, did not have the performance, and did not provide value. New access points and emerging applications demand performance, security, and ease of use. We hear many times that IT directors would prefer to have the IoT network separate and distinct from the information network. With a WaveTunnel you can do an parallel network, keeping that IoT traffic completely segmented.

WaveTunnel powered by VineSuite offers the performance of wire, wirelessly, with physical and virtual security. It’s simple to configure, fast to deploy, and easy to manage. Future VineIQ implementations will monitor and control the WaveTunnel network in real time, using adaptive AI algorithms.

In summary, the WaveTunnel system, with its groundbreaking 60 gigahertz non-line-of-sight technology, goes through walls, beams around corners, while delivering multi-gigabit performance, providing connectivity wherever you need it–not where the cable lies.