CITY EVALUATES 113 PROPOSALS AND SELECTS STRIX’S MULTI-RADIO, MULTI-CHANNEL, AND MULTI-RF SOLUTION FOR 40 SQUARE MILE METRO-AREA NETWORK

CALABASAS, Calif., April 29, 2005 – Strix Systems, the leader in high-performance wireless mesh networking, today announced that the City of Tempe, AZ has selected its Access/One Network Outdoor Wireless System (OWS) for its city-wide Wi-Fi deployment. The deployment was won in partnership with MobilePro, a wireless technology and broadband telecommunications company, and will be branded WazTempe. The installation will use Strix’s multi-radio, multi-channel, and multi-RF mesh solution; the highest capacity mesh solution deployed anywhere today. The City of Tempe selected the Strix solution in order to support a true multi-use network, which will provide secure Wi-Fi access for businesses, residents, and guests, as well as a separate network for municipal workers. This tandem network will ensure that, while residents enjoy Wi-Fi access, every police car and fire truck in the city – each of which will be equipped with a Wi-Fi enabled laptop – will have an always-on connection to a private, secure network.

After a side by side trial deployment with a competing, single-radio mesh solution and the Access/One Network OWS, it became clear that the city-wide deployment required the Strix solution. It is the only mesh system scalable enough to handle the size of the network with enough performance to handle the capacity and real-time applications expected to be deployed on the network. Unlike competing mesh products that use either single or dual radios, Strix’s Access/One Network OWS supports up to six radios per node, providing dedicated high-speed wireless bandwidth for backhaul ingress, backhaul egress, and client connectivity. The Strix approach ensures the highest throughput and lowest latency over multiple hops, ensuring the highest performance for voice and video applications over the mesh while enabling easy and cost-effective future network expansion.

“We chose the Strix solution in partnership with MobilePro because we saw the high throughput and low latency the system offers across large networks,” said Dave Heck, Deputy CIO for the City of Tempe. “After evaluating the Strix Access/One Network OWS installation proposed for Tempe, it was clear that this system could scale while maintaining the levels of throughput needed, keeping latency low enough to support real-time applications. When complete, the city-wide network will provide anytime, anywhere access to residents, businesses, and municipal workers, enhancing the way people connect to the Internet, do business, and serve our community.”

Tempe’s wireless network will cover all 40 square miles of the city limits, offering services to residents and visitors on an annual, monthly, daily, and hourly basis, while providing much-needed competition to cable and satellite internet services. The network will allow access to multiple Internet service providers (ISPs), and is robust enough to provide telephone service via Voice-over-IP (VOIP). There will be a zone in the merchant district of downtown Tempe that offers free Internet access on a limited basis, which will encourage shoppers and students to enjoy the downtown area and lakeside venues while surfing the net. The Strix wireless network will also enhance Tempe business offerings and enable them to leverage mobility for profit. Customers will enjoy the freedom of wireless Internet, and workers can leverage the power of online communication and data access while in the field.

“The City of Tempe has a history of technological innovation, so it is a great validation of Strix’s technology and our services,” said Bruce Sanguinetti, president and CEO of MobilePro’s wireless division Neoreach. “To be hand-selected from a group of 113 possible proposals also speaks very highly of the combined systems and services that MobilePro and Strix are capable of deploying.”

“Our Access/One Network OWS is the only solution currently deployed that enables customers to dedicate radios for both ingress and egress in the mesh backhaul as well as separate radios for client access,” said Bruce Brown, CEO of Strix Systems. “When deploying a multi-use network over a large metro area, such as Tempe, this multi-radio, multi-channel, and multi-RF approach is necessary in order to maintain high throughput and low enough latency to deliver the real-time services Tempe’s users demand.”

About Strix Systems
The Strix Systems Access/One Network family of products represent the next generation of wireless LAN products, leaping past the traditional access point and switch architecture to mesh; a self-discovering, self-configuring, self-tuning, and self-healing wireless network incorporating robust security and comprehensive management. The Access/One Network family of products support all 802.11 RF technologies and offer multi-radio and multi-channel high performance managed mesh networking systems for indoor enterprise deployments and outdoor public safely, municipal and metropolitan networks.

The Access/One Network can be configured and managed via Manager/One, a comprehensive browser based management platform that allows IT administrators to control all key elements of their wireless network, or using Access/One Networks carrier grade support for SNMP based management. Additional features of the Access/One Network products include Virtual/Strix and Priority/One. Virtual/Strix supports deployments of multi-use or virtual networks where various user segments are sharing one Access/One network. Priority/One allows administrators of these multi-use networks to ensure quality of service by assigning varying class of service filters to any type of network traffic or user group. Access/One Networks are ideal for data, voice, and other real time communication network applications. For more information about Strix Systems, please visit www.strixsystems.com