LightPoint Adds FE

SAN DIEGO -- LightPointe, a designer and manufacturer of high-speed outdoor wireless products, today introduced the FlightExpress(TM) 100, the newest member of its Flight(TM) family of products. The FlightExpress 100 is specifically designed for enterprise customers with two or more buildings requiring connectivity at distances of 200 meters or less. The FlightExpress 100 delivers Fast Ethernet speed and sets the new benchmark for high-quality, affordable enterprise outdoor bridging solutions.

The FlightExpress 100 is ideal for "quick hop" high-speed wireless links, such as across a parking lot or a public street. In these scenarios, the FlightExpress 100 provides substantial deployment improvements in time and budget over fiber-optic cable, which often involves installation challenges, lengthy delays or exorbitant trenching costs. Additionally, the FlightExpress 100 provides substantially higher throughput at a full-duplex rate of 100Mbps than 802.11 radio frequency (RF) bridges that operate at half-duplex rates of 11Mbps or 54Mbps.

According to Bob Preston, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at LightPointe, the FlightExpress 100 further extends the company's optical wireless product portfolio for entry-level enterprise customers, while continuing to offer many of the features from the company's industry-leading FlightLite product line. "With FlightExpress, we've continued to build upon our products' proven combination of throughput, ease of installation and affordability," he says. "By providing aggressively priced high-speed connections for distances of 200 meters or less, FlightExpress 100 immediately gives more enterprises an opportunity to experience the bandwidth and economic advantages of optical wireless."

Weighing less than nine pounds, the compact-sized FlightExpress 100 includes Power over Ethernet (PoE), which eliminates the need for additional electrical wiring to power the system. Since making its debut on LightPointe's FlightLite 100 offering, the PoE feature has won significant popularity with enterprise customers, making installations easier and more economical.

"By adding FlightExpress 100 to our lineup of LightPointe's proven Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet products, we now can offer organizations a simple, cost-effective solution to short-range connectivity challenges," says Michael Feng, director of systems integration for PEC, Inc., a Syracuse, N.Y.-based systems integrator and LightPointe Premier Partner. "With FlightExpress 100, we can bypass the biggest problems in these situations, including rights-of-way issues, trenching, circumventing utilities, traversing parking lots, etc."

LightPointe Communications Inc.