Startup Says Beaming Millimeter Waves Over the Air Will Make It a Star in Ultra-Fast Wireless Broadband

Standing on the flat roof of a data center at an undisclosed location in Boston, a shivering Chet Kanojia gestures toward a sleek white box about the size of a piece of carry-on luggage. This is the proprietary base station that the seasoned startup founder believes will change the way the world receives its Internet and liberate frustrated customers from the iron grip of legacy providers such as Comcast and Time Warner.

The white box mounted on a pole before us is called a Starry Beam. Only about a dozen of these custom base stations exist in the world right now. The team at Kanojia’s newest startup, named Starry, has spent the past 20 months perfecting the base station’s design. Its performance so far on this nondescript rooftop has persuaded Kanojia that the Internet of the future will not be delivered through expensive fiber optic cables laid in the ground, but beamed over the air using high-frequency millimeter waves.

Standing beneath the Starry Beam…[Read more]