Mimosa Networks, the startup that wants to bring fiber-like Internet service to unconnected places, announced the C5i, a Hotspot-to-the-Home Gateway that uses outdoor Wi-Fi to deliver Internet access to the home.
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The C5i |
With this release, the company says it is introducing an entirely new product category to the industry. Mimosa's C5i reduces the cost of Wi-Fi to the home in urban environments by connecting homes to outdoor access points and eliminating the need for multiple pieces of networking equipment.
The company says the C5i Hotspot-to-the-Home Gateway will be particularly effective for stimulating the wireless market in densely populated urban areas that were previously difficult to serve because of low-capacity, spectrally inefficient technology. The 4x4:4 multi-user MIMO radio uses beamforming technology for automatic antenna aiming, so it is self-installable and doesn't require a truck roll.
Last month, the company announced its 802.11ac 4x4:4 suite of A5 access points and C5 client devices. Mimosa launched its backhaul product in August.
The latest release is "all about us delivering a really low-cost customer premise equipment that can be self-installed," Jaime Fink, co-founder and chief product officer at Mimosa, told FierceWirelessTech. "It's completely designed for the urban world or city Wi-Fi environments, where the consumer can literally take a piece of equipment home, attach it to a window to get incredibly high performance through city Wi-Fi and start to get fixed Internet speeds at fiber kind of speeds at extraordinary low cost."
A new breed of urban ISPs is emerging--they're no longer the wireless Internet service providers, or WISPs, of years past, but people who want to provide Wi-Fi services to smartphones around a city, and they need to be able to penetrate the walls of buildings, he said.
"This particular piece is kind of like the crown jewel, in my opinion, of changing the market from being a rural, wireless fixed market to being something that can be a competitive alternative to fiber, cable and DSL in higher-density markets," which is also extremely relevant outside the U.S. in unconnected markets, Fink said.
"We're really positioning ourselves to have a very differentiated access point technology that will be able to re-use spectrum at a much higher rate and use multi-user MIMO and leverage Quantenna's chip technology to get extremely high performance capacity in that market space," he said.
The manufacturer's suggested retail price is $119 for the C5i, which is available for preorder on the Mimosa website and will begin shipping in spring 2015.
The C5i connects to any outdoor 5 GHz Wi-Fi access point, although thanks to Mimosa's TDMA protocol there are significant spectrum re-use, capacity and performance advantages when connected to a Mimosa access point, the company says. Inside the home, the C5i broadcasts using an integrated 2.4 GHz radio and connects wirelessly to any Wi-Fi-capable device.
Mimosa's B5 Backhaul radio runs on 5 GHz spectrum and features coordinated massive MIMO technology, which enables collocated radios to deliver 16 MIMO streams and 4 Gbps of throughput while sharing the same channel. The B5 radio conducts constant spectrum analysis to find the best, interference-free radio link, according to Mimosa.
For more:
- see the press release
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