alarm:clock

Wireless - Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Bel-Air Networks - Profile

HQ: Kanata, Ontario, Canada

Founded: 2001

Management: Bernard Herscovich is President and CEO. He was the President of Breezecom, and VP of Wireless at Newbridge Networks, and spent ten years in engineering and management positions at Nortel Networks. His co-founder & CTO is Stephen Rayment who led the development of broadband wireless products for the MMDS band at Nortel. You know we are talking Canada when their VP of Engineering is named Marcel Chénier.

Investors: In October 2005, Comcast Interactive Capital invested in Bel-Air along with McLean Watson Capital, T-Mobile Venture Fund, JPMorgan Partners, VenGrowth Capital Partners and BDC Venture Capital. The company has raised $44M in total VC funding .

Business Model: The company sells a set of products for mesh wireless networking. It has a fair number of wins from Mumbai, India to Bristol, UK. However, Bel-Air had joined AT&T in making an unsuccessful bid for Wireless Philadelphia, a nonprofit charged with developing low-cost wireless Internet access for the city, and probably the most high-profile recent metro-wide bake-off in the US.

WiFi Management System

Mesh Cluster Node

Competitors: Tropos Networks, Firetide, Strix Systems, and Clearwire.

Dirt: This is very high-stakes sales poker. Cities around the world are considering which suppliers to work with. Each win at this stage is crucial to getting other wins. So far Bel-Air is doing fine and the Comcast investment is certainly meaningful, but it has a long way to go to ensure that it will not become an also-ran.