In a high-speed proof of concept, Motorola, partnering with General Motors, came in first and second in the GT1 Class at the 24 Hours of LeMans endurance race last month, using a mesh network to transmit maintenance data from the race car to the pit crew at 200 mph.

The Motorola MOTODRIVE technology gave GM"s Corvette racing team video feeds that showed the pit crew who was in front of and behind the car and sent engine and tire diagnostics to the crew so the crew could prepare in advance for the next pit stop.

The mesh networking architecture, acquired from Mesh Networks in an acquisition last December, used numerous wireless routers posted around the 10.726-mile LeMans race course to send the data.

Whereas a typical wireless LAN requires each access point to use a wired backhaul to send data, the mesh concept uses each router as a wireless hopping point that receives and sends the data to the next router down the line until it reaches the server.

"The routers are spread all over the place," said Rick Rotondo, director of marketing at Motorola. "You could be hopping in different directions, through different sets of nodes, similar to the way the Internet works and you end up in the same place where the data is recombined."

Motorola"s mesh topology is being used mainly by police and fire departments in a number of municipalities, including deployments in Medford, Ore., and Garland, Texas. The GM race car trial confirmed that Motorola could transfer broadband data at high speeds.

According to Rotondo, commercial applications might include automated car-to-car communications so that if one car suddenly brakes the device would send that signal to other cars on the road traveling at speed to slow down cars behind the braking vehicle.

However, the real emphasis of mesh networks will be on metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi, said Craig Mathias, principal at the Farpoint Group.

"Mesh nodes cost about US$2,000, but because you don"t need a wired backhaul they are far more cost effective than putting up access points around a city," Mathias said.