SAN JOSE, Calif.—Wavion Inc., a new metro Wi-Fi gear-maker, announced its corporate launch, along with the availability of its Multiple Input, Multiple Output-based hardware. The startup says its Spatially Adaptive Access Point quadruples the coverage and capacity of current Metro Wi-Fi and cuts equipment costs by half.
Backed by more than $22 million in funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital and Elron Electronics Industries, Wavion said its spatially adaptive access points can deliver higher data speeds along with better coverage with minimal dead spots. The company boasts that one of its access points does the work of three to four conventional access points.
“Metro-scale Wi-Fi deployments are about to face the same increased demands for throughput and reliability as we’ve seen in other WLAN applications, both residential and enterprise,” stated Craig Mathias, principal with Farpoint Group. “Wavion’s use of MIMO technology with beamforming and space-division multiple-access (SDMA) will become a compelling approach to dealing with these requirements, with the additional benefits of improved price and performance.”
Rather than use commoditized chipsets with single radio and diversity antennas, Wavion said its custom-designed, application-specific chips and software use six antennas and six radio transceivers in a single access point, harnessing the power of MIMO, digital beamforming and SDMA technologies for metro Wi-Fi deployments.
“Beamforming and SDMA are the ideal technologies for the outdoor wireless environment,” stated Mati Wax, founder and chief technical officer of Wavion. “The key to making these technologies practical is a design tailored to the specific challenges of the outdoor environment, enabled by very tight integration at the silicon layer with the modem and the embedded software.”
The list of citywide and regional Wi-Fi network projects in the United States is growing quickly. According to the latest numbers from Muniwireless.com. 122 municipal Wi-Fi projects were in the works last July—as of April, there were 193 with an additional 37 municipalities considering construction of Wi-Fi networks. Municipalities in the United States are expected to spend more than $400 million in 2007 on wireless networks and nearly $700 million during the next three years.
“Since I began following this industry more than two years ago, everyone has struggled to get a handle on just how big this market really is and what the market opportunity represents for companies building and deploying wireless networks for municipalities,” said Esme Vos, founder of Muniwireless.com. “Our study is the first to quantify the market’s size and growth potential and leaves little doubt: This is a market that has quickly gained critical mass and is destined to grow at rapid rates for the foreseeable future-even with the obvious questions surrounding the technical and political challenges.”
