Inward and Upward

Rob Mechaley founded RadioFrame in 1999 to tackle the last wireless frontier: the great indoors. Wireless penetration in the U.S. and abroad was well on its way to the astronomical levels of today, but wireless providers were lacking a compelling reason to seed the cavernous in-building gaps with wireless access. Mechaley decided to give them that reason and spent the next three years working on what would lure carriers inside.

He thinks he has it. RadioFrame is enticing growth-hungry wireless operators with the promise of enterprise data, which allows them to run 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless local area networks over the same access points they use to propagate cellular and PCS signals, creating a whole new revenue stream.

“The incentive is to expand the breadth of their business,” Mechaley said. “Getting into 802.11 is an inevitability for wireless carriers. Operators are used to deploying big footprints — they're quite used to managements of tens of thousands of users simultaneously. They understand the way radio works.”

This isn't Mechaley's first attempt to break new ground in data communications. As chief scientist for AT&T Wireless Services and its predecessor McCaw Cellular Communications, he co-invented CDPD, or cellular digital packet data, and helped develop the wireless local loop technology behind Project Angel.

Mechaley's former colleagues and employers think his next big idea may have some merit, too. He plucked his executive and engineering staff from his development team at McCaw and AT&T: CEO and President Jeff Brown, Chief Technology Officer Mary Jesse and Director of Product Development Greg Veintimilla all worked with Mechaley on the CDPD and Angel projects. His former boss Craig McCaw became one of RadioFrame's first investors, along with U.K. wireless carrier Orange, which bought Mechaley's last venture Wildfire Communications. Even Mechaley's replacement at AT&T Wireless, former CTO Nicolas Kauser, signed on as an investor and board member after leaving AT&T, joining venture capital firms including Ignition and Ericsson Venture Partners.

RadioFrame has a lot of muscle, both financial and technical, but it also faces a lot of inertia. Data has been all the rage among wireless carriers ever since the term “3G” was first uttered at a wireless trade show, but Wi-Fi wasn't necessarily the type of data play most carriers envisioned. In fact, many view it as party-spoiler to the industry's efforts to deploy its high-speed mobile networks.

“This is the perfect opportunity for carriers,” CEO Jeff Brown argued. “3G is delayed, but carriers want to understand the model behind wireless data. This architecture allows them to get into the market early and truly focus on an enterprise's data needs.”

At least one carrier sees some wisdom in those words. Nextel — traditionally an enterprise-oriented mobile operator — has been tackling the in-building issue for years, creating a separate division to deal with the coverage needs of its large base of corporate customers. Its play has been only a voice play so far, trying to expand coverage for its core business customers. But with RadioFrame's new architecture, Nextel sees a way of pumping revenue out of what is essentially a value-added service it gives its customer, and doing so with a technology its customers want and often already use.

“When RadioFrame came on the scene, we saw very quickly an opportunity to offer other in-building solutions besides iDEN,” said Ernie Cormier, Nextel's vice president of enterprise solutions. “From the carrier side, it's easy to look at 802.11 as a potentially damaging technology to 3G. We hope to turn it into a complementary technology.”

RadioFrame's system consists of several radio access points that contain custom smart-antennas, called RadioBlades. Each RadioBlade is designed for a different technology, whether it's GSM, CDMA, iDEN or 802.11b, and software inside each access point processes each signal separately. The heart of the network is a chassis unit that interprets the various data coming in from the access points, offloading local data traffic into the Ethernet network while acting like a base station sending voice traffic back into the carrier's public network.

The chassis manages the calls and users on the entire network and handles security and authentication. RadioFrame is quick to point out it's not a run-of-the-mill microcell solution in which individual cells act independently of one another. It's a network unto itself with a central management server, capable of scaling to 2 million square feet of coverage. It doesn't even require individual power supplies for the access points, running instead off of the powered Ethernet cable connecting the modules together.

Currently, RadioFrame has iDEN and 802.11b blades ready for commercial release. It's about to release its first GSM blade and will follow it up shortly with a CDMA version. But don't expect to see any wideband CDMA or cdma2000 blades any time soon. Some carriers may be attracted to the idea of bolstering their 3G network coverage indoors, but supplementing their 3G networks with 802.11b technology may be much more appealing, said Steve Hooper, a former colleague of Mechaley's at McCaw turned partner at Ignition and RadioFrame board member.

“You'll never build a wide area 802.11 network,” Hooper said. “The technology wasn't designed for it. But offloading 3G traffic onto the local network is entirely possible.”

Regardless of what path carriers choose, 802.11b will most likely thrive. Demand for wireless LAN technology isn't being created out of thin air, a criticism many analysts level at 3G. The surge has been driven by the companies themselves. With no licenses to buy or lease, enterprises began managing and sometimes installing the networks internally.

But 802.11b was envisioned as a much smaller technology than it has become today. Instead of a few computers hooked into a small network, Wi-Fi can handle massive corporate campuses. It's becoming very much a business geared toward a service provider business model.

“802.11 is the technology of mobile workers,” Nextel's Cormier said. “You can't ignore it and hope it goes away.”