After Aereo's Collapse, Founder Hopes To Disrupt Wireless Broadband Market With 'Starry'

from the good-luck-out-there dept

You'll of course recall that Aereo founder Chaitanya Kanojia's attempt to disrupt the TV industry ran face-first into an army of broadcaster lawyers and a notably ugly ruling by the Supreme Court. Undaunted, Kanojia has returned with a new plan to try and disrupt the frequently pricey wireless broadband industry. Kanojia's trying to do this via a new startup named "Starry," unveiled at a launch event this week in New York. Starry is promising to offer users uncapped, gigabit speeds at prices less than most people pay their incumbent broadband provider.

Kanojia claims that the service will deliver this ultra-fast connectivity via what it's calling the country's "first millimeter active phased array technology." FCC documents suggest that Starry will utilize spectrum in the 38 GHz band to deliver broadband to urban areas via hundreds of rooftop nodes scattered around the city. Users are given both a "Starry Point" antenna that sits outside their window, and need to buy a fancy $350 router called a "Starry Station" to connect to their various Wi-Fi devices. Kanojia tells TechCrunch that the technology will only cost around $25 per home to deploy:

"It costs the cable guys around $2,500 per home to deal with the construction costs of laying down cable,” said Kanojia on a phone call, setting the scene for his next big unveil. “And beyond cost, there are regulatory hurdles that slow down the process. We can deliver faster broadband with no regulatory wait time and it will cost us only $25 per home.” Kanojia won’t disclose pricing but says that the service will offer various tiers based on speed (up to 1GB up and down) and that it will be “orders of magnitude cheaper” than current broadband providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable."

The catch? One, nobody really knows specifically how well Starry's phased array technology is going to work (especially in regards to line of sight), and Starry isn't offering much hard technical detail right now beyond a YouTube video. If it does work, millimeter wave technology will still require the deployment of hundreds if not thousands of nodes across a city, distance limitations restricting its use to only denser urban areas. The broadband landscape is littered with the corpses of thousands of urban WISPs, which still rely on incumbent bandwidth, and still require slow, cumbersome deployment of a sizable amount of gear.

And while real-world disruption of national incumbents will probably be minimal, it's still refreshing and absolutely necessary to see somebody try (and fortunately there's spectrum available to try with). According to Starry, users can pre-order the self-install kits at the Starry website, after which they'll be made available at Amazon and other retailers. The service will launch first in Boston in March. Variety got wind of the fact that around fifteen cities should be unveiled as launch markets sometime this year, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Washington D.C., Seattle and Denver.

And while nobody actually knows whether Starry will really work, with no real regulatory or legal hurdles in its path, Kanojia's latest attempt at disruption -- at the very least -- shouldn't wind up face down and unconscious at the Supreme Court.

Filed Under: competition, open spectrum, spectrum, wireless
Companies: aereo, starry