Netro completes AT&T fixed wireless acquisition

Having completed its acquisition of AT&T Wireless' Angel fixed wireless technology, including a development team, a license to intellectual property, equipment and proprietary software assets, Netro is now looking overseas for customers.

Netro will “immediately target the 3.5 GHz market internationally” with the technology, which AT&T used to serve 50,000 customers in 10 cities in the 1.9 GHz and 2.3 GHz spectrum bands, said Allan Evans, Netro’s chief scientist.

Transforming the technology to another frequency should take until July, but Evans said he is confident in the capabilities of the proprietary technology.

“It did fundamentally work,” he said. “We did a lot of due diligence.”

Evans said that Netro will maintain, almost intact, AT&T’s research and development facility in Redmond, Wash., and will continue to hone the technology. Unlike AT&T, Netro has no plans to become a service provider, he said.

He also said the U.S. market, while not yet settled on a wireless strategy, is not out of reach for Netro’s future marketing plans.

“The same technology can be applied at MMDS [2.5 GHz to 2.7 GHz multichannel multipoint distribution service]” where U.S. giants Sprint and WorldCom are testing second-generation products, Evans said. “We’re not excluding the U.S. market, but it’s more upside for us. The key would be if any of these operators do anything more than a trial.”

For now, he said, the market is overseas where service providers “need to be able to deploy a high-speed data pocket to compete with DSL.”

Netro paid AT&T Wireless $16 million in cash and 8.2 million Netro shares--about 13.5 percent of its outstanding common stock--for Angel. Upon the closing, 123 AT&T Wireless employees became Netro employees.