FAQs
FAQs
A Deeper Dive, by Subject
The Company
To accelerate the world’s progress on closing its persistent digital divide through faster, more affordable broadband for literally billions of our fellow folk.
G1. The world’s first next-generation fixed wireless access platform, which introduces a complete revolution in delivering real broadband service at mass scale in a fraction of the time.
Cloud management for G1 installations — equally revolutionary in providing intelligent visibility into complex network operations.
Over 200 internet service providers in 19 countries, coming from all categories (incumbents and new entrants, large and small, wireless and wireline in origin, licensed spectrum and not).
An extraordinarily talented, high-functioning, and quickly-growing crew of over 300, endowed with 23 PhDs and 74 masters degrees among them.
Our exec team is applying an outstanding combination of experiences driving hyper-scaled commercial success in tech (at Amazon, DISH, Infinera, Nokia, Ruckus, and Xircom) as well as fundamental advances in radio network technology (for ArrayComm, BeamReach, Qualcomm, and Tarana). Their roles and bios appear below.
We raised $170M in March, 2022 from three super-solid co-leads (Axon Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Prime Movers Lab) and other large institutional investors, and our revenues are rising very quickly. We’re confident we’ll be fine on this score.
Our Market
The network performance and economics of our new approach to broadband is a great fit for subscribers across a very wide range of market conditions and household densities — but we’re leaving very remote areas with essentially no infrastructure (and the oceans) to satellites, and super-dense apartment building neighborhoods to PtMP microwave across rooftops.
Given the broad applicability of our G1 solution, it’s no surprise that our detailed, country-by-country analysis of the world’s broadband challenges and opportunities indicates a total addressable market (TAM) measured in many 10s of $B. Remember, 90% of the world’s 2.3B households need a new access solution.
Competition
Designed from the ground up specifically for ngFWA, G1 delivers fiber-class broadband over non-line-of-sight links, in unlicensed spectrum (enabled by a true industry first in interference cancellation), at a fraction of fiber’s cost and time to deploy. Our network economics are 3x better than 5G at FWA.
(1) Oodles of substantive and well-patented inventions in wireless signal processing; (2) custom silicon essential to G1’s economics it would take multiple years for anyone else to replicate (which couldn’t start till after the years they’d need to first catch up on item (1)); and (3) meanwhile, we’re aggressively developing our next platform and inventing even more incredible new approaches to wireless performance.
Fiber is great when you can string it for free on power or telephone poles (or trees, in the developing world). In most other situations, though, it’s harder and more time-consuming to install than you’d like. There, fiber + Tarana is a much better plan.
The 3GPP 4G and 5G standards were architected to serve a few gigabytes/month to mobile devices in expensive licensed mid-band spectrum. As a result, 3GPP network economics are inherently incompatible with the delivery of the currently terabyte-scale monthly tonnage demanded by typical fixed household subscribers. Outside small-household pockets in secondary markets with low mobile spectrum loading, mobile operator prioritization of fixed service in licensed spectrum (with ~50x lower ARPU per GB consumed) cannot be justified in the long term.
Despite lots of excitement about Starlink and its companions in the low-earth orbit scene, the raw realities of broadband demand density in mainstream markets and resulting network capacity requirements are generally beyond the reach of satellite ventures. Given LEO systems’ orbital geometry, capacity, and coverage area per satellite — along with the unavoidable fact that 71% of the planet is covered by water — their utility in closing the world’s residential digital divide will be limited to areas with fewer than 1 HH per km2. This puts the LEOs in a useful but necessarily peripheral role for closing the global divide at scale.
Wi-Fi suppliers have been following form in their enthusiastic advertisement of very high link speeds theoretically achievable with Wi-Fi 6 and (coming soon) 7. In the real world of outdoor applications, neither 6 nor 7 add any of the core capabilities required to deliver reliable fiber-class broadband at scale in unlicensed spectrum, particularly in the domain of self- and external interference mitigation.
Our Work
From the very beginning, we’ve had a super strong bias toward just getting great stuff done together and away from corporate dysfunction in its many forms. We’re all committed to keeping it that way as we grow.
Our technical team continues to break new architectural ground for the industry in radio networks, massive real-time processing in custom silicon, and AI/ML-powered cloud network management. Manufacturing is of course a heroic exercise amid extremely challenging global supply-chain conditions and our rapid growth. Our marketing, sales, and support teams are on an incredible ride of capturing and responding to high growth in interest, demand, and deployments as well.
Extraordinarily so. We’re building a great company, and even more important, one that will change the world for the better. We sometimes joke that we don’t need a corporate social responsibility program, because we ARE a social responsibility program.
Our Future
So much so, we gotta wear shades. We’re hiring like mad, so there’s lots of opportunity for more gifted folk to come help make a huge difference for the world, and enjoy a truly unique journey with us along the way!