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Americas Issue: June 2005
Cover Story
The 10 Coolest Companies of 2005
It's a new era of business-focused firms that directly address technology
refinement and product development while spotlighting the business benefits
of their wares - and the business needs of their service provider customers.
That's how we define "cool".
by Bob Wallace, Editor-in-Chief and Jim Barthold, Senior Editor
With their wreckage strewn about the industry like crushed cars at a massive junkyard, countless so-called “hot” companies from past years provide striking evidence of the fate that awaits innovative companies that lack an understanding of the business of technology.
Before the tech bubble burst, a great idea combined with big name leaders and sizable venture funding landed start-ups enough awards to embarrass the collective medallists at the 2004 Olympics.
But those days are long gone, having given way to the dawn of a new era of business-focused firms whose efforts directly address technology refinement, product development and a keen focus on the business benefits of their wares—and the business needs of their service provider customers. That’s how we define “cool.”
While larger firms with internal marketing machines may be garnering much more attention, Telecommunications® magazine’s 10 Coolest Companies have quietly developed innovative products that address customers’ business needs and deployed them in service provider networks, with operators realizing quantifiable benefits from their use.
So let’s toast this lot for their attention to the business of technology, an area brought into focus by so few companies in the past several years of telecom turmoil.
Cheers!
The Companies:
AirTegrity Wireless
Arsenal Digital
Entrisphere
Infinera
Mintera
Pannaway Technologies
Positive Networks
Solace Systems
Telution
Vanu
AirTegrity Wireless
Differentiation With a WiMAX Voice Push
While most people are still waiting to see how the fixed broadband wireless standard—WiMAX—shakes out as a delivery platform for high-speed data, AirTegrity Wireless is pushing the envelope by emphasizing voice as part of its technology.
“It’s definitely an interesting idea,” said Peter Jarich, principal analyst for wireless infrastructure at Current Analysis. “If you’re trying to differentiate yourself, going after voice is clearly a way to do that.”
It’s also risky because, frankly, there’s no shortage of voice connectivity anywhere in a world that’s pretty neatly tied into a wired bundle.
“Trying to position yourself as a voice solution with WiMAX will make you different than the rest of the folks, but I’m not necessarily sure how valuable that’s going to be,” Jarich said.
That wireless voice component is important to AirTegrity’s plan to help providers complement their existing services or, where possible, help others compete with incumbents.
“We’re going into markets where telcos exist today, but they’re constrained by traditional landline-based technology which is bound by the number of wires in the ground,” said Greg Phillips, AirTegrity’s CEO. “This would let them open up into areas where they would have to go back and retrench.”
The company is demonstrating its wares at its Stateline, Nev., headquarters and in a trial in the Reno-Carson area but expects bigger success overseas.
Even there, Jarich said, voice will be a tough sell as a feature add-on.
“How many markets are there where you can’t get voice services out to them?” he asked.
Everything depends on the success of WiMAX. As other WiMAX vendors come into play with data-based equipment, AirTegrity plans to be a step ahead with a data-voice offering—“WiMAX in a Box”—for service providers to feed commercial campuses and business parks.
“We’ve built a QoS offering over WiMAX to guarantee that those voice calls will operate as well as, if not better than, the QoS you’d expect over traditional wired telephone networks,” Phillips said. “We’ll succeed because
of the extra values that we bring to the product range in the market and the differentiators we show with the competitors.”
Of course if WiMAX, as is planned, adds a mobility component in later specifications, everything could change.
“Trying to come up with an alternative mobile voice solution definitely has a little bit more intrigue,” Jarich conceded. “But still, there’s no shortage of fixed voice solutions and no shortage of mobile voice solutions. ”
Arsenal Digital
Storage Solace for Providers, Users
Shifting mindsets from technologies to business applications in the telecom industry can be as tough as moving mountains, with operators more focused on bigger bandwidth than answering corporate America’s actual and ever-changing business needs.
A raft of regulatory requirements and data management mandates including HIPAA and Sarbannes-Oxley have been forcing C-level executives to think beyond backup and recovery offerings to actual storage and archival services.
Arsenal Digital has been quietly addressing both groups of needs by teaming with service providers (e.g., AT&T, Time Warner Cable) to provide enterprises with end-to-end managed storage services. Helping companies achieve this storage solace represents a huge and largely untapped opportunity for all service providers.
Providing storage services in networked environments is an Arsenal specialty and a key driver for this market segment, claim industry experts.
“The storage services market shows two key dynamics: The complexity of networked storage continues to create opportunities, while the commoditization of disk hardware creates services pricing and margin pressures,” said Doug Chandler, program director for storage and data management services research at IDC.
Storage services are also instrumental in supporting skyward growth of storage software. According to Michelle Zou, research, analyst for storage software at IDC, “The storage software market has grown about 16 percent in 2004 over 2003. IDC expects the market to grow at a 10 percent CAGR from 2004 to 2009, driven by customers’ requirements to manage data more effectively across complex, networked storage environments.”
A business case in point: Arsenal’s teaming with Time Warner to deliver a turnkey managed storage service package.
“The service focuses more on helping customers avoid systems and applications failures than on archiving data per compliance requirements. Nonetheless, it will help providers drive data traffic over their networks,’’ Chandler said.
Arsenal Digital executives are more than willing to share users’ pain.
“ViaRemote Managed Storage enables us to become a more strategic partner to our customers because we can address a very complex set of pain points related to data protection, business continuity planning and regulatory compliance,’’ said Bo Coughlin, vice president of TWC’s Commercial Services, Raleigh Division.
Service providers that focus on selling Arsenal Digital-powered services as part of a large bundle aimed largely at small and midsize businesses will be most successful, says Chandler. Success is defined as achieving two goals: driving traffic volume on their high-speed networks and driving new revenue streams by providing tangible business benefits.
Arsenal refuses to rest on its laurels. In mid-April, it launched ViaRecovery, a fully managed, on-demand, rapid server recovery service for business continuity and disaster recovery. It’s an automated solution that enables organizations to complete a secure bare metal recovery of business-critical server operating systems, applications and data up to 80 percent faster than traditional methods.
“At the heart of every good business continuity, disaster recovery and regulatory compliance plan is a sound strategy for rapid server, application and data recovery,” said Adam Couture, principal analyst at Gartner.
Arsenal Digital says it has raised $102 million in funding since its inception in 1998. The Cary, N.C.-based firm uses some 30 Internet data centers in 20 cities worldwide to support more than 900 customers on five continents.
Entrisphere
Aiming High
There’s always a need for a firm that aims high. Entrisphere could be that company.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor wants to do business with the nation’s top 20 carriers and has built a product scaled for that sort of customer base. Those are not companies that usually associate themselves with a start-up or relative unknown, as they might view Entrisphere. But they are companies that, if they follow the plans they’ve laid out for deep fiber networks, would seem to be in line to use Entrisphere’s multiservice access platform.
Analysts have little doubt that Entrisphere has built a viable product; they just question who’s going to buy it.
“I personally think the product appears to be forward-looking in terms of its capabilities and its functionality and it does provide the RBOCs, in particular, with a platform that could
be used for both their older types of services as well as their movement towards a converged network,” said Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst at broadbandtrends.com.
A muiltiservice access platform delivers DSL, fiber-to-the-premises and TDM
voice on the same network. TDS Telecom, the nation’s seventh largest telephone company, has chosen the platform for in-region and out-of-region deployments for both passive optical networks and ADSL2+. Other top tier telcos are expected to follow a similar network pattern, although none have thus far committed
to Entrisphere.
Don McCullough, the company’s marketing director, said cable companies are also pushing farther out in their networks with converged services and might be in line for something that merges all the capabilities.
“If I were to predict a trend, it’s not just for telcos anymore,” said McCullough. “Driving the fiber out into the network all the way to the home or most of the way to the home—a fiber-to-the-curb solution or a fiber-to-the-node solution—to do all those things in a variety of different networks is proving to be important.”
That could mean surging business for Entrisphere, suggested Mastrangelo.
“The market opportunity right now for that kind of product isn’t very big,” she said. “It’s going to grow, though.”
Entrisphere’s best bet might be to develop “some kind of a niche application that’s going to get them in the door and hopefully they can build from there,” she continued.
Niche or not, Entrisphere is set on its product offering: a multiservice access platform that integrates PON, next-gen digital loop carriers, packet voice and some additional pieces. It’s a catch-all for the big player looking to deliver everything.
It might work and it might sell. Or it might be too big of a bite.
“To have announced as their first customer one of the top 15 telephone companies in the U.S. is a feather in their cap,” said Kermit Ross, president of Millennium Marketing. “It speaks to their product’s capability. The question in my mind is, does it scale to fit where the applications are going to be?”
Infinera
Digital Is Better
Infinera is a company with a very simple mantra: the world is going digital; digital is better; let’s build digital products.
For Infinera that means enabling a digital optical network that is “a very different approach from the way conventional WDM systems manage light,” said Rick Dodd, the company’s marketing director.
Infinera has taken digital to its tiniest threads, accumulating more than 50 optical devices, from lasers to modulators and everything in between, and squeezing them onto a single semiconductor that is then incorporated into a larger system that transforms the telecom optical network from analog to digital.
“That’s a pretty fundamental change in the network,” said Jagdeep Singh, Infinera’s CEO.
It’s an industry-changing change, said Mark Lutkowitz, a principal with Telecom Pragmatics, who thinks that Infinera may be a once-in-a-decade company, “a start-up that truly gets what the market dynamic is all about.”
Lutkowitz said he’s impressed with Infinera’s ability to develop disruptive technology while maintaining an evolutionary approach to deployment.
“When you think of disruptive, you usually think of something bleeding edge that’s going to potentially change things. They’re in this small group of companies that understand that to be truly disruptive they have to have some very leading edge technology … but what they’re doing fits in a traditional SONET-type of network or an electrical optical situation,” he said.
It’s not that the company doesn’t want every provider to switch out all the analog optical elements and go digital—or doesn’t firmly believe that is the most cost-effective, most easily managed way to proceed—it’s just that Infinera understands that telecom is about gradual migration, not rushed evacuation.
“The change starts out with newer networks, but sooner or later there are compelling operational advantages to having a single operating platform in your network. As you decommission old systems, you’ll be left with a pure digital network,” Singh said.
While Infinera’s approach is not necessary radical—after all, everyone knows digital is the future—it was bleeding edge when the firm started four years ago with the belief that an all-optical network wouldn’t cut the mustard from a cost or manageability standpoint. Infinera immediately promoted the development of a PIC (photonic integrated circuit).
“Four years later, the all-optical network is all but dead and we have product in the network,” Singh said.
Success, of course, is never guaranteed but Lutkowitz is confident that Infinera is “a company that’s out there for the long term. An RBOC or an ISP is traditionally very hesitant to go with a small start-up but they may be … the aberration of this decade,” he said.
When, not if, that happens, Lutkowitz predicted, “that company will enable them and open the door to all these opportunities with other carriers. That’s saying a lot because it’s traditionally the case where it’s very hard for a start-up to get in.”
Mintera
Minting 40 Gbps Transport '
After a near-paralyzing optical overdose that had carriers and investors avoiding financing fiber forays like a working vacation, landmark advances have both parties examining technology innovators with a keen eye toward the business application of their wares.
In fact, Mintera is convinced carriers believe the most efficient distance between two points is a straight line, without intermediary equipment, as this high-flyer builds subsystems capable of carrier traffic at up to 40 Gbps.
While senior corporate management and visionary investors claim there are metro and regional uses for these systems, it appears the nearest-term and broadest use would be in what’s called ULH (ultra long-haul) applications in carrier backbone networks.
“We believe that the telecom industry pendulum swings to extremes and has swung wide to the down days,’’ began Mintera CEO Terry Unter. “But now it’s swinging back because parts of the industry have been spending much more on product development instead of first focusing on sales and marketing.”
Unter’s belief, and that of others at Mintera, is that climbing traffic on building and campus backbone networks is fueling the need for carriers to upgrade the capacity of their metro, regional and long-haul networks dramatically to deliver flexible high-bandwidth carrier Ethernet services.
To that end, it should come as little surprise that Ethernet inventor, 3Com founder and all-around firebrand Bob Metcalfe has joined Mintera’s board and has had his venture capital firm, Polaris Ventures, figure prominently in the vendor’s recent $18.5 million round of financing.
The Ethernet services focus seems clear given that prebubble burst start-up Yipes Enterprise Services, which provides managed metro Ethernet offerings to corporate users, landed $24 million in additional funding the same week Mintera received its latest infusion.
Mintera and its financiers are also banking on the evolution of high-speed optical transport systems, which had seemed stalled for most of the past several years. ULH product vendors hope to capitalize on the continued evolution of high-speed transport systems from 622 Mbps to 2.5 Gbps in the early 1990s and to 10 Gbps in the late ’90s.
Lowell, Mass.-based Mintera has gone well beyond product development, having demonstrated a ULH transport connection with MCI and Ciena Corp. in June of last year and a live traffic trial on the Cernet net in China. The firm has also inked an agreement with Mahi Networks, announced last February.
But ULH, which does provide solid operational benefits, is not for everyone nor for use everywhere in carrier networks today.
“ULH can deliver lower costs by eliminating the need to regenerate/repeat the signals along a fiber path between two widely separated points,” explained Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. “It can also reduce the path delay between these two points if the regeneration technology adds any delay (which it almost always will). The downside is that you have to be concerned about pretty widely separated points for the differences to matter, and there has to be enough traffic between the two points to justify the path.
Pannaway Technologies
Ring Out the New; Ring in the Old
You could almost say that Pannaway Technologies’ model is to ring out the new and ring in the old. Almost.
The Portsmouth, N.H.-based vendor has a suite of products serving the assumption that rural telcos want to roll out advanced IP-based video and data products but are more conservative about the third leg of the stool: their existing TDM voice infrastructures. Pannaway, in addition to providing the first two IP pieces, is now encouraging the RLECs to adopt the third.
“We went out and built a complete VoIP implementation that looks, smells and tastes like it’s a TDM network,” said Mike Skubisz, Pannaway’s CTO.
The model is founded on the interesting—and some might say controversial—notion that telcos are interested primarily in developing broadband IP services for video and data, but that voice remains an also-ran.
Pannaway builds a digital loop carrier offering that’s similar to legacy DLCs, so the telco can deploy the equipment in a familiar package in terms of its footprint and can run it in a traditional mode or VoIP model. The technology also lets the telco continue to offer all the features of TDM telephony, including lifeline service and E-911 capabilities while, if desired, adding an advanced layer of IP-based features.
The legacy portion is important, Skubisz said, because, unlike next-generation VoIP providers that run on broadband networks, an ILEC “can’t just roll out VoIP whether your customers want it or not unless it can be completely transparent to your customer base.”
There is growing demand in the market for this type of hybrid solution, said Kermit Ross, president of Millennium Marketing.
“I like the fact that it scales. I like the fact that it’s IP end-to-end. I like the fact that it comprehends the things that telephone companies have to do—E-911 capability and lifeline voice capability. I like the fact that they comprehend that for the last 70 years or so telephone companies have assumed the responsibility for powering the network,” Ross said.
Pannaway provides a mechanism for back-up dial tone through its DLC that delivers up to 10 hours of power for a telephone user.
“Most of the other VoIP carriers [say] they’re not obligated to provide battery back-up for their customers; if you want it, go buy a battery,” Skubisz said.
Pannaway’s model is borderline radical in that is depends on a telco’s desire to build out video and IP data networks without a voice component. It’s also not for the large RBOCs, but they wouldn’t be interested anyway, Ross said.
“It’s scaled right for what the telephone companies are interested in and need to do—find ways of deploying IP-based services, blended services, the so-called triple play on an IP network that rides on the existing physical infrastructure,” Ross said.
Positive Networks
Honed, Hosted VPN Services
While the actual demand for VPN functionality to support remote workers and telecommuters has soared over the past decade, the telecom industry has struggled mightily finding a viable approach that meets the broadest corporate networking needs.
Early approaches were primarily premises hardware-based. Fat client software alternatives followed. Managed premises packages from service providers were next. Those that had the resources to install, configure and support these offerings bought in, while most that didn’t opted out.
Enter Positive Networks Inc., which has embraced the hosted VPN model to provide the base functionality—and much more—as a turnkey service, breaking down the final barrier to widespread deployment, especially in the vast SMB market segment.
The Overland Park, Kan.-based firm provides remote access and end-point security, along with support for Microsoft critical updates, as a pure service, minus premises hardware, fat clients and the often-accompanying management morass.
Launched in 2001 with a team led by former Sprint executives, the company is financed by Montgomery & Co. and Justin Jaschke, the founder of Web hoster Verio. Positive reported earlier this year that it’s already profitable and has some 250 enterprises under management.
But just as the reach of VPN approaches lengthens, so too does the list of protocols, access methods and security schemes service providers need for sustained success in this market segment, industry experts say.
“The keys to victory here are providing broad geographic coverage, support for a range of protocols such as SSL and IPSec and a wide variety of access methods, including 2.5G and 3G wireless options in the future,’’ said Lisa Pierce, vice president at Forrester Research. “The optimal way to address the requirements is through partnerships and alliances.”
The hosting model Positive uses is worthy of merit, Pierce said, adding that providing VPN services over MPLS carrier backbones will draw far more attention to the offerings.
Targeting companies with 100 to 1,000 remote users, Positive focuses heavily on end-point security, an issue that kept users away from VPN offerings in droves in the mid- to late 1990s.
The company’s hosted service supports SSL and provides antivirus, firewall and spyware functionality, in addition to the above-mentioned support for Microsoft critical updates. The last of the list helps IT managers be sure that the very latest patches have been applied before access to the corporate network is granted.
The vendor also provides the Positive Support Portal that enables it to disconnect a user from the corporate network upon a security violation, while maintaining a support connection between the Positive NOC and the user to troubleshoot and resolve problems.
Positive’s claim that it already has over 250 customers attests to the market traction it has gained using the hosted model buttressed by all the additional features and functionality. Company founders and investors likely are hoping VPN will one day mean Very Positive Networking.
Solace Systems
Routing for Revenues
Service providers that suffer from sleep deprivation when planning for profit efforts can begin to rest more easily as their suppliers polish gear that supports Web services and portends to help recast—and reinvigorate—business on the Internet.
Solace Systems hopes to become the sleep-easy supplier to service providers with its recently launched 3200 Series Multiservice Message Router, an innovative device that intelligently routes Web service and XML traffic, and delivers high-value content in real-time.
The Ottawa-based firm and incumbent router rivals are aiming to offer differentiation by climbing above network-level offerings to application-oriented services. Solace claims that unlike today’s IP-based networks, its approach provides deep visibility into the XML-based messages exchanged between applications and can interpret the content in a manner that’s beneficial to the application or the network.
“Solace is an example of a growing trend in enterprise networking, a trend toward increased application awareness through support for Web services and SOAP,’’ said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. “Things like firewalls, access policy management, identity and single sign-on, and even server load balancing are examples of network-level attempts to address what are really application-level problems.”
Web services set the framework and provide the mechanism for the exchange of information between applications aiming to use the Internet for enhanced communications between businesses and their customers, partners and other business entities.
This trend is of paramount importance to carriers even before they reach the network nirvana of all-IP networks, as they’ll have similar infrastructures and still be searching for differentiation in the services they deliver.
“The 3200 Series is the foundation for next-generation, application-oriented network services,” said Craig Betts, president and CEO of Solace Systems. “Service providers can now monetize the fast-growing XML traffic in their networks and enter new lines of business without deployment delays or heavy upfront investment. Our customer trials over the past year have confirmed tremendous pent-up demand for cost-effective solutions that efficiently disseminate high-value information.”
As a services platform for message routing, the 3200 Series can accelerate deployment dramatically and reduce the cost of service delivery. Furthermore, with hardware-based XML processing and pay-as-you-grow scalability, the solution ensures sustained performance through mission-critical conditions and large message volumes.
“The adoption of service-oriented architecture and Web services for applications offers an opportunity to support the application level of IP in a single, standardized way,’’ explained Nolle. “This is going to be a very hot space with many strategic implications. Solace seems to be framing the issues and addressing the early opportunities in a clever and logical way.”
As is the case with all other Coolest Companies, Solace has a shipping product and customers. One Canadian IP/MPLS services provider, MTS-Allstream currently is developing a suite of innovative network-resident XML services based on the 3200 Series Message Router.
While upstart cool companies may never really relax much, rest-assured that service providers likely are losing less sleep over planning for profit.
Telution
Building Cable’s OSS
There’s an age-old story of a man who kept hitting himself with a hammer. When asked why, he responded, “because it feels so good when I stop.”
The story applies to Telution, whose daunting business model is starting to convince a cable industry hooked on instant gratification that it’s better to look at long-term possibilities and to revamp their OSSs to make it happen. This means, overturning the industry’s current OSS paradigm, where billing companies are all-powerful, and adopting a more telco-like model.
“Realistically, it’s hard to compare the cable and telephone industries today in terms of business,” understated Elisabeth Rainge, director of OSS/BSS at IDC.
Generally speaking, though, cable is more impulsive—entrepreneurial is the term the industry prefers—while telcos often have been accused of being slothful. When it comes to the OSS though, telcos seem more in tune with a migration strategy than cable, which continues to hand off most responsibility to billing companies.
“Those billers tend to be the all-encompassing OSS. We think that’s going to change over the next couple years and there’s going to be a breakdown of the billers’ stranglehold on introducing new services. We want to be there to be the forefront player with a solution to the new kind of evolution,” said Apollo Guy, Telution’s CTO.
Telution wants to drive cable into an era where IP is an all-encompassing interactive multimedia service that incidentally includes voice. To do that, the cable OSS—if such a thing even exists—must change.
“I see positive signs in the way cable operators are looking to manage their infrastructures from an OSS perceptive or from an equipment purchasing perspective,” Rainge said.
Telution, she said, is taking a “very practical approach” of migrating what it understands from working with CLECs in the telco space into the cable space.
“Their approach to the cable market is reasonable. In some cases, we’re seeing cable operators that are fully on board with the OSS/BSS ideas that we’ve seen from a pure telecom perspective for a long time,” Rainge added.
On the other hand, Telution gets hammered while trying to deal with an industry that’s used to rolling out a new targeted service every 18 months and instantly reaping the rewards. Today’s cable operators must look farther out than the next product introduction, Telution execs say, and they will.
“They made a big step forward when they went to high-speed data and created groups around IP pipes,” said Kent Steffen, Telution’s CEO.
Now they have to make a bigger one: shift from the network to the applications that ride on top of it.
“Telution’s focusing on the applications. They’re focusing on the voice and, they say, potentially the content and the interactivity,” Rainge said. “What Telution is doing makes sense.”
Even if it can be painful.
Vanu
Redefining Software Radios
In the stereo speaker business, the saying “bigger is better” seemed to cover the concert hall and home sound system market quite well, with huge, towering systems a fixture in both venues. Bose Corp. changed all that forever with tiny—and often wireless—speakers offering sound quality that more than made up for their seemingly “small” size.
Vanu Bose is aiming to do for wireless operators’ radio base stations what his father Amar did for the sound system industry: Turn it on its ear.
Stations that can be defined using software is quite different and portends to make more efficient use of operator resources when implementing new specs and standards.
In developing, deploying and driving acceptance of his wares, Vanu has stuck largely with the standards set by his dad, whose firm developed the tagline of “better sound through research.” As a direct result, Vanu Inc. quietly has produced an innovative product that’s commercially available and already deployed, minus the marketing blitz and overhang that all-too-frequently backfire on those it’s designed to assist.
Vanu’s Anywave Base Station enables the more affordable construction of base stations that can support multiple standards simultaneously, modify the RF planning and assignment of standards through remote software parameter changes and upgrade to new standards using a software-only download.
The software-driven system, which aims at helping operators make more efficient use of spectrum by simultaneously supporting the demands of the past, present and near-future, caught attention at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes by snaring the 2005 GSM Association Technology Innovation award for Best Network Infrastructure.
“Just because a base station radio contains software, doesn’t mean it’s software-defined,” Bose noted. “One goal was to reduce windshield time—the time technicians spend driving between far flung stations to upgrade them manually to handle new or changing technologies.”
A business case in point for Vanu was Mid-Tex Cellular, which bought and deployed the Anywave Base Station in its network in rural Texas to support GSM and CDMA-based services efficiently. The Vanu radio enables the operator to benefit from roaming agreements with Cingular and Sprint—providers whose services use disparate technologies.
With the current—and anticipated—spate of operator mergers and acquisitions involving separate wireless assets, the future seems bright for Vanu Bose, who received multiple advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded his firm in 1998.
The Vanu system is affordable and flexible as it consists of a base station transceiver and a base station controller that the founder says are each a Vanu software radio application running on off-the-shelf HP ProLiant servers. Throw in an ADC Digivance system providing the wideband RF capability and a TELOS Sonata SE softswitch and you’ve got the Mid-Tex package.
Since its inception, Cambridge, Mass.-based Vanu has engaged in projects with U.S. government agencies and countries abroad, such as India, which makes the company’s accomplishments far more than just big, loud marketing noise.
Bob Wallace is editor in chief of Telecommunications® magazine (bwallace@telecommagazine.com).
Jim Barthold is the magazine’s senior editor (jbarthold@telecommagazine.com).
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