Robert Gemmell is thinking about a group of people, scattered throughout the world, who each live in a nice house or apartment in a semi-rural area. These people want fast Internet access, but they either can’t get a cable or digital subscriber line installed, or the installation costs far too much.
These people, Gemmell thinks, are primed for cheap, easy-to-install fixed wireless broadband Internet access.
Gemmell is the chairman and chief executive officer of a company he thinks is poised to offer just such a product to exactly this type of market.
Cirronet Inc. recently commercially released its WaveBolt fixed broadband Internet access product-a product the company said will tap into the virtually untouched market for residential broadband Internet access.
The market is huge, according to a recent report from The Strategis Group, which predicted nearly 35 million customers by 2005. Of that number, at least 5 million will be using some kind of wireless high-speed access product.
“We see that residential broadband will be fairly large,” said Peter Jarich, director of broadband research at The Strategis Group.
Wireless access will be key, Gemmell said, especially in countries like China, which don’t have the kind of DSL and cable infrastructure the United States enjoys. These countries, and the Internet-ready groups of people living in them, are ready for the kind of product Cirronet offers, Gemmell said.
“The need is for a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy, last-mile product,” he said. “There’s an unmet need for broadband service in the mass market.”
“Our mission is to change the way people access the Internet.”
Cirronet is marketing its WaveBolt as an affordable, easy-to-install broadband access product. It sells for $400-way below the prices of the company’s competitors, including Breezcom and Nokia, Gemmell said.
“That’s a very good price point,” Jarich agreed. “A lot of wireless systems are pretty expensive.”
In addition, WaveBolt requires no modem card installation; it simply works from Microsoft Windows’ dial-up program. The product itself is a small, compact box about the size of a paperback book, and-unlike TV dishes, which must point exactly to the transmission’s source-WaveBolt has a 90-degree transmission arc and must only be pointed in the general direction of the Internet service provider’s access point.
Cirronet’s new product is a result of years of engineering and study and is the flagship product for the company’s new face and direction.
Until just last month, Cirronet was called Digital Wireless Corp. The company worked in the industrial wireless market, designing hospital networks to monitor heart patients and wireless radiation monitoring devices for nuclear power plants. Formed in 1987, the company became profitable in 1996.
The name change comes with the company’s entrance into the broadband market. It is taken from cirrus clouds, which change shape to fit the climate.
Gemmell said Cirronet used its industrial know-how to move into the broadband market and design WaveBolt. The product is made with industrial-grade materials, and is weatherproof.
While designing WaveBolt, Cirronet executives looked at the broadband market worldwide to decide exactly what they needed to create.
“In most countries in the world, you can’t even get dial-up” Internet access, said Gemmell.
This led Cirronet to explore the need for wireless broadband. In its research, Cirronet executives decided the company’s product would need to meet a number of specifications: It had to be inexpensive in order to draw customers and ISPs alike, and it must have free spectrum to work in.
“We’ve not found a single country where you cannot deploy this technology,” Gemmell said.
WaveBolt works in the 2.4 GHz band, which is unlicensed in most countries in the world. While this saves companies from the cost of spectrum acquisition and potential political problems associated with spectrum sale, it can also create problems, Jarich said. The sheer number of companies looking to take advantage of the free spectrum can potentially cause interference.
Gemmell said Cirronet’s new product bypasses possible interference in the band by using frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum radio-frequency technology, which he said allows data on the network to “hop” randomly through channels while traveling.
The outlook for Cirronet and WaveBolt is good, Jarich said. The market is ripe for just such a product.
“The Cirronet product looks pretty interesting,” he said. “They’ve got something that can make wireless more viable.”
