Deltenna sees a huge market for its highly compact high-gain directional antennas which can boost the range of cellular base stations by three to five times.
Like many clever things we’re doing something which is blindingly obvious which no one’s ever thought of," Peter Claydon, vp of sales and marketing at Deltenna, told EW at today’s Silicon South-West Wireless 2.0 conference in Bristol.
"If you use Deltenna WiBE antennas you get a bigger range from the basestation – in theory 10X the range you get from a dongl - in practice three to five times the range", said Claydon, "we had a customer doing trials in Scotland and he was 14 miles from the basestation and still getting very good data throughput."
Normal range is five miles – maybe less.
"I don’t know of anyone else who can do a product like this, it’s a unique product," said Claydon.
Current production is in the hundreds of units a month but, in September the company will up that to 2,000 of units a month and will be ramping from there.
"The main thing is it’s a high gain directional antenna which fits in a small space. We can get a number of antennas in a very small space. There’s a huge market for it. If you look at countries like India, most of the broadband will be wireless and the biggest proportion will be for 3G and LTE", said Claydon.
The Deltenna technology has the ability to find the most useful signal, not necessarily the strongest signal.
"If there’ more than one basestation it’s logical to use the strongest signal", said Claydon, "but it’s better to use the one with the better throughput. So our antenna can select the option with the bigger data throughput. We have a Deltenna patent on that technology."
Asked how the technology did that, Claydon said: "It will do a mini-download from available basestations to see which has the best performance."
Deltenna’s antennas have another unique capability which is useful when the user is on the radius of a number of cells and where there are problems with interference. "As a directional antenna it can reject interference and give you a stronger signal", said Claydon.
Deltenna’s expertise derives from understanding the whole radio-antenna-baseband interaction. "A lot of people don’t understand the whole thing", said Claydon, "there’s a huge value in understanding the whole system – the interaction between antennas and radios and baseband."
Deltenna will be selling the antennas through mobile operators with their High Street shops and through value-added resellers which provide services to small businesses.
Buzz Networks is one of the organisations launching Deltenna antennas.