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July 08, 2007
Zinwave Raising Capital To Make Wireless Go Further
Getting cellphone calls in elevators and underground offices is a hit and miss thing. And pity the network managers that cannot make sure Blackberry-wielding executives get their emails and messages wherever they are in the building or parking garage.
So we figure Zinwave out of England, which can solve that problem without a massive capital expenditure, is onto a good thing.
We will soon find out if VCs feel the same way as it is currently raising €15M. Zinwave, which was founded back in 2002, raised an $8M series A round from Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity Partners. It is now raising its B round, according to one of its backers, Stuart Patterson at SEP, the investment company that helped MTEM from the research lab to a couple of hundred million acquisition target in three years.
There's a buzz on right now about inbuilding cellular coverage. And Zinwave can benefit from it with its recently released products and a broadband solution that supports anything from land mobile radio to cellular and Wi-Fi over the typically existing fiber infrastructure.
Basically, it figured out how slip radio signals into a single optical cable and pump them out wherever normal antennas fail.
It's a so-called Optical Distributed Antenna System. That means a network manager connect Zinwave hub (shown above) to remotely placed antenna units, over fiber, and they can add a basestation to boost particular cellular network coverage, if required.
It claims the ability to carry 2G, 3G, PMR/LMR, TETRA, Wi-Fi, WiMAX - anything operating in the 370MHz to 2.5GHz range.
There are four competitors for this type of in-building gear, each with their own strenghts and weaknesses, as the Computergram article we linked to below suggests. Patterson says Zinwave's closest competitor is MobileAccess, which uses different cabling.
He also explained that Zinwave's origin was a university reserach breakthrough, a technology in search of a problem, and that it took the team about a year to figure out where the sweet spot in the market was for it.
It now has some reference customers like Tyco's headquarters in the US, and the plan is to ramp up, secure the easier RFPs it gets, like emergency services TETRA systems, and to grow the customer base internationally.
Read Computegram Analysis of Zinwave and Co.
View - Zinwave
Posted on July 8, 2007 07:11 PM | Posted to Wireless | Permalink
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