SPOKANE, Wash.-Wi-Fi antenna supplier Vivato Inc. decided to close its doors, leaving several municipal Wi-Fi networks up in the air, or at least not sure how to maintain, replace and troubleshoot the company’s equipment.
Municipalities using Vivato’s Wi-Fi equipment include Frankfurt, Ky.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Kent, Wash.; Los Lunas, N.M.; Sarasota, Fla.; and Spokane, Wash. In addition, Vivato’s wireless equipment was used to set up Wi-Fi networks at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and with the Coeur d’Alene Indian Tribe in northern Idaho.
After five years in business and more than $65 million in venture capital, the company posted a statement on its Web site stating, “This difficult decision was deemed by Vivato to be in the best interest of creditors, shareholders and customers based upon the company’s projection of its future results.”
The statement also explained that the company is in the process of selling off its intellectual property, including its patent portfolio covering Wi-Fi and WiMAX technologies in areas such as beam forming, wireless packet systems, antenna design, interference mitigation, MAC and PHY layer algorithms and channel selection. The statement warned potential buyers that the company would no longer offer support for its products.
In 2002, the company launched its wireless local area network antennas, which it claimed overcame Wi-Fi’s short-range dilemma by directing individual beams at individual users, following them as they moved around. The approach worked well in the face of typical WLANs at the time, which blanketed areas with signals, allowing everyone within the blanketed area to access the network. The company’s PacketSteering technology was patented, but hadn’t reached its potential when WiMAX and mesh networking technology came onto the scene with their own solutions for Wi-Fi’s range problem.
The company said it plans to send out notifications to its creditors in January detailing how it expects to deal with its credit obligations.
