Rural Broadband Access

In a challenging and competitive business environment, rural electric utilities are looking for opportunities to add value with new services for their customers.  Offering customers high speed Internet services is an ideal opportunity for rural electric utilities to expand their service model. 

Often times, low population densities of rural communities make it difficult for incumbent providers to make the business case for extending their systems.  As a result, many rural areas remain underserved or unserved.  A high speed wireless network can meet the unique challenges associated with Internet services to these customers.

Trilliant’s acquisition of SkyPilot Networks in 2009 brought extensive expertise in broadband wireless access solutions since SkyPilot mesh networks had been deployed by numerous wireless Internet service providers globally.  Trilliant leveraged this rich heritage in broadband wireless to re-purpose the SkyPilot mesh network as the SecureMesh® Wide Area Network (WAN) that offers the same performance benefits.

The SecureMesh WAN is an ideal solution when consumers are widely separated and rolling terrain makes line-of-sight unattainable.  The Securemesh WAN goes beyond conventional point-to-multipoint solutions because it can cost-effectively scale to reach remote rural customers.  Other point-to-multipoint solutions have difficulties with interference and the ability to maintain bandwidth over longer distances.  Our WAN mesh technology provides exceptional interference mitigation, and the dynamically switched antenna array supports distances up to 10 miles between nodes with dedicated bandwidth. 

Our WAN architecture provides unparalleled scalability and flexibility.  The self-healing nature of the mesh technology offers built-in reliability.  The solution includes:

• SecureMesh Gateway nodes to inject capacity into the network
• SecureMesh Extender nodes to expand the mesh to reach up to 50 miles away from the Gateway
• SecureMesh Connector nodes (or CPE devices) to provide broadband connectivity

The low total cost of ownership helps make the internet service provider model work for rural electric utilities.