Last night I was flipping through the new issue of Business 2.0, and one of the “new products” caught my eye. It’s really not the kind of thing that would catch most people’s eye but it definitely caught mine. It was a 2-way radio which used 802.11b for transmission instead of typical radio waves.

The reason this caught my eye is that we have a 2-way radio system at work which costs us 6K/month in subscription fees, so anything we can do to get those costs down is likely to catch my eye.

The problem, obviously, is that 802.11b doesn’t have a very fantastic range at all. So, I looked around for a company that might have technology that could increase the range while still allowing decent throughput offsite so that these 2-way’s might be worth getting.

I came across an article in an old Wired magazine which talks about just such a company.

The article is a bit old, so I called the company up and they’ve started pushing consulting more than this particular product, but they do still offer it.

It’s an idea I’ll leave on the shelf for now until our general wireless initiatives have matured a little, however it is an interesting technology as, theoretically, you could outfit one entire “metro campus” with just 3 of these devices, and connect over 3000 PC’s to it.

Yes, that’s right, you could outfit an entire University for Wi-Fi with just 12K in equipment.