Unlicensed & Lightly Licensed Radio products available from SIAE UK

SIAE UK Designs, Builds and Supports complete Wide Area Networks. An important aspect of the overall network design lies in the solutions selected for the Network Access layer. Due to the economics of large implementations and despite the fact that costs per link in the Network Core are much higher, it is often the Access layer cost that drives the overall commercials - hence its importance.

One of the key solution options available lies in the use of products that are certified for use in bands of the RF Spectrum that have been allocated by the Regulator (OfCom in the UK) as suitable for unlicensed use, or lightly licensed use. Typical solutions operate in the 2.4GHz band (not recommended on grounds of increased useage and related interference on this unregulated part of the RF spectrum) and sections of the 5GHz spectrum.

Particularly appropriate to deployments of the Last Mile network layer, de-regulated solutions allow Point-To-Point and Point-To-Multipoint solutions to be delivered at a peak in the bandwidth/cost graph.

There is a potential down-side and this relates to the very fact of these being used in less tightly controlled parts of the spectrum, and that is the increased potenial for RF interefence. This potential is in fact less of an issue than at first might appear to be the case, and there are a large number of configuration factors that can be deployed by the designer/installer, such as different RF channel, directional antennae, varied polarisation etc. It must however be taken into account in the trade-off between cost and performance.