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PHOENIX – Mike Golden, CEO of Sedona, Ariz.-based research group Gigaband Networks Inc., is in a joint partnership with the Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering to make his dream service a reality – and it’s growing legs.
Golden sees opportunities in last-mile connectivity, and recognized building out fiber to homes was and is a large part of that. Last mile services typically include wireless service providers, DSL telephone connections, and cable and data services.
“When I watched it start to happen from the major carriers, it was pretty clear it was going to take 50 years to be able to connect all the homes in America at the rate stuff was being built out for a ubiquitous fiber-to-the-home network,” Golden said.
Golden went to the drawing board to find a low-cost technology to deliver fiber-to-the-home class services, but without the fiber. The model became using commodity technology that is already manufactured in the millions present-day.
“We fixed on using Wi-Fi access points and set about to dramatically improve the antennae technology that’s connected to those cheap radios to manufacture a very low-cost product,” said Golden.
ASU is using the patented intellectual property from Gigaband to develop, design, test and model the concept into physical shape. For the service to work, a neighborhood has to sign on to using a Gigaband network.
The antennae, or subscriber node, created by Golden’s research group and the team at ASU is a product that can switch almost instantaneously between five different faces from a subscriber’s home to the Wi-Fi radio that is built inside the node. When the node goes live, it lights up. The node then listens and sends directional beams from different areas using multiple input, multiple output technologies that are in Wi-Fi radios to several different directions, honing in on other nodes and connecting them to the neighborhood’s central anchor point hub. Gigaband projects that the subscriber node will deliver Ethernet connectivity to locally served television content and Internet at 50 to 100 megabits per second using an Ethernet cable into a subscriber’s home.
Golden said instead of getting 300 feet to 500 feet between nodes in a network, his product will get up to five miles between nodes (in line-of-sight distances) at the full throughput the radio can support, which is around 200 Mbps.
The company recommends the product for placement on storm gutters outside of residential homes for optimum performance.
Golden said a network of 500 nodes in a residential neighborhood, using the steering capability of the beams and traffic modeling, can deliver up to 100 Mbps of symmetrical service to every subscriber.
Instead of LTE or WiMAX, this technology doesn’t use tall towers used in mobile applications for a wide radius of subscribers and shared bandwidth. Golden plans for the technology to compete directly with not only traditional Internet services, but Internet television and said that it should support up to four high-definition televisions being fed different streams at one time, and said it will still allow for optimum clarity to the home.
Another plan of Gigaband is to add a hub called a “disc farm” for every 500 subscribers in a neighborhood, where content is stored as it’s initially captured from broadcast and made available on a random access memory basis, indexed and placed in a cache in the neighborhood network without digital video recording boxes needed in the home.
Golden claims that the cost comparison when in volume production will be about $400 per subscriber connected to the network and that the capital costs are about 1/20th in comparison to laying fiber.
The company plans to license the use of the technology in the areas of nodes, anchor points, software and television servers to neighborhood service operators who will sell, install and operate local networks under these licenses.
Gigaband is now in the process of looking for seed funds to demonstrate the technology in test neighborhoods, likely near the university and is shooting for an initial $500,000.
