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March 9, 2003

Intel Capital Invests in Vivato

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Vivato will announce tomorrow an investment from the Intel Communications Fund. Vivato did not release the amount provided by Intel, but did disclose its total outside investment is now $29 million. Vivato announced last April that it had received $20 million in second round funding; it received $5.5M in first round. We can do the math. This investment is about strategy and branding more than cold cash.

After months of limited information, Vivato recently unveiled its first product along with pricing and availability. The Vivato Wi-Fi switch couples a phased-array antenna with an enterprise grade network gateway that can potentially provide longer range, higher throughput, and lower deployment costs.

The phased-array antenna allows individual beams of focused wireless signal to follow individual network devices across several hundred feet indoors -- an entire floor of a building more or less -- and at distances of up to four kilometers outdoors. An antenna mounted externally pointing at a building may be able to provide service for an entire facility, such as a hotel.

The first version of their switch is priced under $10,000 and serves 150 users using three beams; it's due to ship as soon as May. Each beam is a switched connection, offering full Wi-Fi speed without requiring channelization. The FCC approved Vivato's approach by agreeing that their design qualifies as point-to-point service.

Intel Capital put aside $150 million in its communications fund specifically to advance Wi-Fi-based technologies. Some of the companies the fund has invested in before its specific set aside that touch the wireless networking and hot spot worlds include BlueSocket, iPass, Nomadix, and Radiant (Bluetooth and other wireless seamless mobility, ISP/wISP aggregation and reselling, edge-security and authentication, and mesh networking, respectively).

The two significant investments from the $150 million set aside so far are STSN, which is involved in the hotel wireless service build-out that Intel's Centrino program just gave a boost to, and TeleSym, an IP telephony company (oddly omitted from the fund's page listing firms they've invested in).

Intel Capital is also one of the triumvirate behind Cometa; its two other investment partners are AT&T and IBM. (There are two other more traditional investors, whose role isn't defined on Cometa's Company page. That page clearly indicates the participation of AT&T and IBM as infrastructure-oriented, which may mean no cash is involved.)

Several companies I've spoken two over the last few months since the $150 million was set aside have told me of their inability to light fires at Intel Capital to invest in various projects. Part of that has to be that in the telecom and wireless climate, $150 million isn't a lot of money.

The investment in the three companies so far have certainly tied up between $20 and $30 million. It's unclear whether the Cometa investment, which is surely at least $10 to $15 million in initial set aside, comes from the general fund or the wireless component. (Cometa isn't listed as a company invested in by the fund.)

Intel Capital is certainly pushing the keiretsu model of synergy among its companies. Vivato's switch can certainly benefit Cometa as well as Intel's Centrino marketing efforts.

This investment assures that Vivato will have the funds necessary to more aggressively push product out, ramp up production lines, and compete against enterprise players like Proxim and Cisco.

Although a Reuters articles notes that three other companies -- all in the hot spot space -- received investments at the same time, two of the three list the Intel investment weeks or months ago: rovingIP.net (wISP/network services), Broadreach Networks (pay-as-you-go kiosk and hot spots), and Pronto Networks (turnkey hot spots; see my article on turnkey systems). The Broadreach investment appears on that company's site as a Feb. 18, 2003, press release; Pronto noted their Intel funding on Jan. 21, 2003.

(Thanks to Paul Boutin for a dollars-and-cents clarification.)

Other News

T-Mobile expands in the UK: Adding to the United Kingdomania on hot spots, T-Mobile says their free trial in Starbucks in England will expand nationally to 56 hot spots by the end of May. Seems paltry compared to the 300 that Inspired will have in place at pubs, but we'll see how fast it accelerates. Once again, the notion of vendor-neutral hosts leaps into view: T-Mobile could have thousands of branded and unbranded hot spots if they weren't obsessed with building the infrastructure and the user base. Pricing is rather high: £5.50 (approx. US$8.80) for an hour, two hours for £14.00 (US$22.40), £16.50 (US$26) for a day, and £37.00 (about US$59.20) for a month. These are prepay options only because of billing system integration issues, according to the article.

PC World extols 802.11g performance: Because of lead time, these tests were certainly performed with older firmware that supported the 5.0 instead of 6.1 draft of 802.11g. The 6.1 draft, as implemented by Broadcom at least, dramatically improves speeds in mixed networks. Still, PC World's graph shows significant improvements; a revision would certainly show even better throughputs. Interestingly, 802.11b cards had better throughput when connected to 802.11g access points. This might reflect more robust signal processing and computational silicon.

Media Lab Asia deploys 85-km-long multi-hop Indian link: With throughputs of 3 to 4 Mbps, this experiment paves the way to connectivity using Voice over IP and data links to areas that are entirely off the grid. The project, involving 38 people, used off-the-shelf equipment and one link spans 75 km. Solar-powered transceivers would certainly be a real possibility in that climate, too, I would imagine, as electrical infrastructure would be part of the missing piece. (The rain on the Gangetic Plain doesn't seem to affect the gain.)