ATLANTA-Amidst the buzz surrounding the emerging broadband market and related wireless access technologies last week at SuperComm ’99, Harris Corp., an established supplier of microwave radio systems, made its move into the high-frequency point-to-multipoint market.
The company, which has been undertaking a restructuring to focus on its core communications equipment businesses, formed a strategic alliance with Wavtrace Inc., a three-year-old company founded to address the broadband wireless access market. Wavtrace’s BWA system is based on time division duplexing technology, which allows information to be transmitted and received via different time slots on a single channel. TDD is a fairly new technology that competes with the established frequency division duplexing technology, which transmits and receives information via separate frequency channels.
The agreement between Wavtrace and Harris calls for the companies to collaborate on distribution, manufacturing and technology. In addition to selling and supporting Wavtrace products, Harris also will acquire a 19-percent equity position in Wavtrace and a seat on its board of directors.
Harris plans to include Wavtrace’s products in the 20 GHz to 40 GHz frequency range as part of the StarBurst point-to-multipoint product line it announced last week. The StarBurst family also will include BWA solutions in the 2.5 GHz, 3.4 GHz and 10.5 GHz frequency bands.
Wavtrace President and Chief Executive Officer Thomas van Overbeek said the relationship with Harris provides Wavtrace expertise in deploying microwave radio systems. Harris, which has stated it intends to be a major player in the broadband wireless arena, fills out part of its broadband wireless infrastructure package with Wavtrace’s system.
Both companies said they hope the relationship will help drive deployments of BWA systems worldwide by offering customers an end-to-end solution rather than a variety of system components.
Bob Stillerman, director of marketing at Harris, said the company has been exploring the idea of BWA for several years, but the market and the business case for BWA did not exist until recently and has developed slowly. The increasing demand for data being driven by the Internet, coupled with the lack of a cost-effective wireline solution to deliver large amounts of data to small-and medium-sized businesses, is beginning to create the market for BWA solutions, said the company.
“We believe now is the right time to jump into the market,” said Stillerman, who noted the company evaluated several options for entering the market and selected Wavtrace in part because of its TDD technology.
Harris has been pursuing the point-to-multipoint market for several months. The company last year began a research and development program with Technology Partnerships Canada to develop point-to-multipoint high bandwidth solutions. Earlier this year, the company opened its Millimeter Wave Design Center in California.
