Some Motorola Canopy Tidbits

There's a thread going on the WISPA General (Wireless, the public list) about how "bad" Motorola Canopy systems are for WISPs to use in their systems.

I posted some tidbits that I've picked up over the years about Canopy that might be of interest, and so I'm posting that information here also.

from Steve Stroh <[email protected]>
to WISPA General List <[email protected]>
date Sep 13, 2007 11:46 AM    
subject Re: [WISPA] Legal Charges used in Malicious Interference Situations

I echo Mike's contention that Canopy was developed directly for use by Broadband Wireless Internet Access Service Providers... but notnecessarily the small, highly entrepreneurial Wireless ISPs.

In my discussions with some key Canopy personnel over the years, some of whom were remarkably candid, some interesting things came out:

• Canopy was originally designed to take advantage of the burgeoning demand for Broadband Internet Access in ulta-high-density markets suchas China. For a variety of reasons, that market never actually materialized, but Motorola (barely) decided to continue Canopy anyway
• Canopy was almost killed several times. One manager "fell on his sword" and retired prematurely as a result of his forceful, but successful lobbying to let Canopy emerge as a product
• Motorola was eventually surprised at how well Canopy was received by the market. For some time Canopy was kept "at arm's length" within Motorola, which during that time Motorola barely acknowledged that Canopy was actually a Motorola product. Even after Motorola grudgingly embraced Canopy as an "official" product, there was at least one very serious attempt to "shop the Canopy division around" to other BWIA vendors. I heard this from several vendors who Motorola approached.
• Part of Motorola's reluctance to embrace Canopy is that it cannibalized some of Motorola's system integration work to build public safety Broadband Wireless systems - Motorola was horrified when some public safety agencies actually deployed Canopy systems themselves (no lucrative systems integration contract)... on the (talk about unintended consequences) "reputation" that Canopy was a Motorola product.
• Canopy was designed for very large deployments by those not necessarily highly skilled in RF issues - hence the one-piece unit. If a service provider "followed the Canopy deployment instructions scrupulously, it almost always worked.
• Motorola KNEW, well in advance, that there would eventually be more 5 GHz spectrum made available in the US - what's now called the 5.4 GHz band, thus spectral efficiency wasn't an overriding criteria in Canopy's original design.
• Canopy's three design criteria were that it be 1) simple to deploy, 2) robust and reliable in operation, and 3) cheap to manufacture and sell.
• Deep down, Canopy's modulation is (pretty much, kind of) FM, adapted for Broadband and Digital operation. (Yes, I know this is probably technically inaccurate and horribly oversimplified, but that's the way it was described as the genesis of Canopy's modulation scheme - it was based on the robustness of FM communicaitons, of which Motorola is a world class expert.
• * The 2.4 GHz and 902-928 MHz versions of Canopy were purely an afterthought, not part of the original plans for Canopy; both were developed only in response to large deployments who needed the frequency diversity and the penetration characteristics of 902-928 MHz.

Thanks,

Steve

By Steve Stroh

This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).