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Wi-Fi’s Next Big Step

RoamAD says it has technology that gives a wireless LAN a city-size footprint.

One of the most interesting businesses I’ve seen lately is RoamAD, a New Zealand-based company that is building technology for seamless metropolitan Wi-Fi coverage. It enables a wireless access provider to offer continuous wireless local area network connections to devices within small, but downtown-size, areas.

By: Rafe Needleman Business 2.0

Wi-Fi wasn’t built for this; the whole idea of hot spots today bespeaks the technology’s short range and orientation toward users that are nomadic (move, stop, communicate), but not mobile (communicate while moving).

In fact, when companies like T-Mobile roll out Wi-Fi systems to thousands of locations, the coverage really does look like thousands of separate networks from the perspective of the computers using these services. The hot spots aren’t integrated and don’t reinforce each other’s coverage. About the only way they are linked is through their billing system.

RoamAD, on the other hand, builds Wi-Fi radio networks. The company looks at the geography and architecture in a contained metropolitan area and engineers a coordinated installation of access points and antennas. They also tweak their radios’ electronic identifiers so a Wi-Fi end-user device sees one big cloud of access, not a bunch of short-range access points. To handle a large number of users, the maximum data rate per device is dialed back to well below Wi-Fi’s native Ethernet speeds, but still in line with 3G (third-generation) network technology at its best.

Fast Facts:

RoamAD
http://www.roamad.com

CEO Paul Stoddart

HQ Auckland, New Zealand

Founded January 2000

Employees 9

Funding Two rounds, amount not disclosed; currently raising third round.

Profitable? Projected in Q4 2003

Market Metropolitan Wi-Fi technology

The company has a 3-square-kilometer test system in Auckland, New Zealand; it is currently working on building a 50-square-kilometer system, which will require about 800 access points. The company says this infrastructure will cost only 5% of the expense of a comparable metropolitan 3G rollout.

There are many technical and financial challenges ahead for this company, but if the team has truly figured out an economic way to blanket a city with Wi-Fi coverage and can defend its intellectual property, its prospects are excellent.

http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,43711,00.html?nl=wn

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