Fixed Wireless Company Lands $30 Million in Funding.

A Calabasas company, Malibu Networks, is making a strong move to enter the fixed wireless broadband access equipment space with the help of $30 million in second-round financing.

The round was led by CVC Capital Partners, in collaboration with Second Avenue Partners, and also included Fremont Communications, TL Ventures, NextCom Ventures, Dow Chemical Co., Enertech Capital Partners, and GATX Capital Corp. First round co-lead investors, ARCH Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners, also participated in the second-round financing.

Fixed wireless broadband has been around for a decade and many companies have eyed it carefully as a way to bypass the stranglehold that traditional telephone companies have on the customer. But the technology has not been deployed quickly because of a host of technical problems. It required strict line of sight, which can be obstructed by objects as seemingly innocent and permeable as tree foliage.

The software typically employed had been developed for other purposes like local area or backbone networks that were less than satisfactory for wireless systems.

Malibu Networks has been working for several years to overcome these problems.

"We've approached the technology in two ways. We addressed the physical transmission to develop resilient signals that will penetrate to customers reliably, and we created efficient software protocols that are specific to fixed broadband wireless," said Douglas Hill, vice president of marketing for Malibu Networks.

According to Hill, the company has filed 21 patent applications with 305 separate claims since 1998.

"It's about 1,200 pages of patent applications on what we are doing. But that's not what's important. People get hung up on it and think the value of the company is in patent applications. But we think it is in building strong technology and shipping it to customers," Hill said.

The customers for Malibu Networks' products include the range of communication service providers - incumbent and competitive local telephone companies and inter-exchange long distance carriers in the U.S. and national telephone carriers (PTTs) and competitive access providers internationally. All these providers will resell the wireless bandwidth to both residential and business markets, particularly small to medium-sized companies.

The product marketing plan is global because the construction of fixed broadband wireless systems is on the increase, particularly in Europe and Asia.

Malibu Networks will produce equipment that will reduce transmission problems. Below 11 GHz, many of the problems of wireless systems go away and these signals at lower frequencies can penetrate rain, fog, and trees. At 2.5 GHz, the signals may even penetrate buildings.

Hill says it's a whole new generation of fixed wireless broadband equipment.

"The existing stuff is slow, expensive and it has a hard time penetrating through to the subscribers. Notice that Sprint rolled out its trial in Phoenix, as opposed to Boston, Portland or Seattle. My theory is that they rolled it out there because the area is flat and there aren't many trees," he speculates.

In the U-NII band, Malibu Network's system delivers 168 Mbps shared bandwidth from each base station. For the typical suburban customer mix, an $80,000 base station will support about 500 business and residential users with high-speed Internet access at various levels of capacity. The system will carry all manner of digital traffic as well, including telephone conversations, file transfers, and video.

Tech trial locations will be selected in February.

Contributing columnist Joan Van Tassel has covered technology since 1990. Her book, "Digital TV Over Broadband: Harvesting Bandwidth," will be published in December by Focal Press.