Coming Unwired: The "Broadband Wireless" Marketplace IBDNetwork held an event on June 25, 2004 on a broadly defined "broadband wireless" market. Four young companies were given the chance to give a short presentation to the audience and to four venture capital experts. After the presentations the VCs and audience were allowed to ask questions. Finally, people voted for the company that they felt had the best chance to succeed. These are some brief notes from the event. Take a look at the notes and the company websites, and you can vote for which one to vote for yourself - then compare your vote with that of the VCs and the audience.
MODERATOR: Chris Shipley, Executive Director, DEMO Conference PRESENTERS: (and notes from their talk) - Clarence "Sam" Endy, CEO, ArrayComm
- Selling an Adaptive Antenna for Last Mile applications. Technology is agnostic, so it can be applied to a variety of radio systems.
- Customers include DDI Pocket in Japan for PHS. They have 30k base stations in Japan, 10k in Taiwan, and 190k in China.
- iBurst is another licensee for mobile/fixed data at 1 Mbps.
- Taking advantage of Intel's push to into WiMax to enter into this market. Also facilitating some 802.16 standards. They see this as a green field opportunity that is easier to penetrate.
- Tried EVDO, but had a difficult time penetrating these accounts.
- Does not see MIMO as a major competitive threat, partly because they feel the market is big enough.
- About 400 patents, or patents filed for.
- A base station may end up costing 20 to 40% more, but one can save by having half the number of stations.
- They are choosing to sell via the OEM route because they feel their core competency does not include manufacturing. There are about 65 people in the company.
- Gideon Rottem, CEO, Extricom Ltd.
- Aiming at Enterprise WiFi scalability by making WiFi more efficient in high traffic areas. They point out the problem with off-the-shelf WiFi is low effective throughput when you have many users because of contention issues. Thus, current WiFi does not really scale well.
- They do a packet-by-packet adaptive adjustment, with link routing and power adjustments. Effective improvement is a claimed X12 to X100 improvement in traffic throughput. Latencies, dropped packets, and down-shifting of bandwidth is avoided. The design in aimed at indoor applications.
- They OEM the silicon and give a reference design. They chose the OEM route because they are a small company located in Israel.
- They do not yet have any customers, but some are in the funnel. They expect to have paying customers in a few months.
- There is a company called Airflow Networks that is a competitor. Gideon says that Airflow recognizes the same market need, but is taking a completely different approach to solving the problems.
- Ike Nassi, CTO and Co-Founder, Firetide
- They sell a WiFi-based Wireless Mesh network router for indoor and even metropolitan network applications.
- The network looks like a fully routed layer 3 network with a single IP address to outside devices, and a layer 2 switched network to devices on the Firetide network. Some of the technology is licensed from SRI.
- The model 100/200 mW 1000S sells for $800 and is for indoor applications. The 2 mile range model 1000R sells for $2,000 and is for outdoor applications. One needs to add the wireless or cabled access points (2/3rds of their installations are WiFi, and 1/3rd are not). The savings come from avoiding wire pulls, which can cost an average of $1000 a drop for indoor situations.
- There are several customers, including the Kahalui Airport where the inspectors use their network. This system went in for $20k, while the airport had originally budgetted $150K. Other examples include the Los Gatos Opera House, and Palm Springs Outdoor Resort. They target hospitality, education, and other campus type applications.
- Chief competitor is the cable. They don't have a real fix on the market size, but see it "in the billions".
- Currently based on 802.11b, but thinking of using WiMax for some applications in the future.
- Guenter Weinberger, CEO, Sandbridge Technologies
- Aiming at selling an SDR-based design for convergence type handheld wireless devices. Just add the RF section, MMC/SD card, memory and some peripheral hardware (e.g. camera CCD).
- They are a fabless design house.
- Target market is the sophisticated device going into one of the newer networks, such as EvDO, EvDV and HS-DPA. Their solution is less cost effective for simpler devices and systems.
- Key team members include a DSP expert, software compiler expert, and a low power hardware engineer. The key to their offering is new "Sandblaster DSP" processor design based on a single instruction/multiple data approach. Their first part is called the SB3000.
- Other functions that they can support include cameras, music, H.264 & MPEG4, Java, security and PDA.
- They do not yet have any customers.
JUDGES:
Click here to learn more about IBDNetwork |
