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Mimosa Networks, a 2-year-old company that is working to bring fiber-level capabilities to wireless network technology, in August unveiled its first products aimed at Internet service providers.
The startup now is turning its focus to the end users, unveiling a suite of access points and consumer devices that officials said will bring broadband speeds via WiFi into homes and mobile devices, creating an alternative to more expensive fiber deployments.
Mimosa’s 802.11ac 4X4:4 suite includes A5 access points and C5 client devices that could create a system where data can be transferred from a nearby access point at gigabit speeds to a smaller client device on an end user’s building or home. Currently, broadband carriers many times—particularly in rural areas—will extend fiber or copper cable to a certain point, then let wireless network technology take over.
What Mimosa officials want to do is create a high-speed wireless network that extends from the cloud to the endpoint, giving wireless Internet service providers (ISPs) a less-expensive option to fiber for delivering their services to end users. And that’s not only in rural areas, but anywhere, including congested cities where speeds can degrade as more users get on the network.
“Where broadband advancement is successful, fiber and wireless technologies work together,” Mimosa CEO Brian Hinman said in a statement. “Providers build out fiber as far as it’s economically viable and from there, wireless bridges the gap. Our technology transports the full bandwidth of the fiber connection, bringing gigabit Internet the last leg of the journey to homes and businesses.”
The company has modified a common chip used in WiFi networks with its own protocol to grow the number of connections each access point can handle, enabling larger numbers of users—as many as 250—to employ a single channel without impacting speed. Mimosa combines the multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology with advanced radio-frequency (RF) isolation and satellite timing services like GPS and GLONASS to push the company’s vision of spectrum reuse.
In addition, Mimosa replaces the traditional controller with its own cloud services to manage subscribers and network-wide spectrum and interference issues, officials said.
The upshot is that more competition is created in the market for providing services to end users and giving communities more options for high-speed wireless access.
“The next great advancement in the wireless industry will come from progress in spectrum reuse technology,” Chief Product Officer Jaime Fink said in a statement. “To that extent, MU-MIMO is a powerful technology that enables simultaneous downlink transmission to multiple clients, fixed or mobile, drastically increasing network speed and capacity as well as spectrum efficiency.”