Industrial areas in the United States continue to urbanize, but some of these places don’t have a lot of fiber running into them. So, enter the phrase “digital desert,” which is a term thrown around even in places like New York City where ultra-fast broadband for businesses can be lacking in some areas.
One example of how that’s being addressed is a new announcement by Skywire Networks that it selected Siklu to enable multi-gigabit broadband for commercial buildings in NYC. Skywire is a Brooklyn-based provider that takes particular aim at business areas it sees as underserved by cable and telephony operators.
Skywire is using Siklu’s “fiber-like wireless links” to help with the network densification bottleneck that it says is occurring in underserved pockets of the city. Siklu reports that the links deliver interference-free communication within weeks to businesses.
“While there is plenty of fiber in Midtown and Wall Street running north-south along the avenues, much of the blocks between the avenues – as well as large parts of Brooklyn and Queens — are digital deserts,” Brent Barbara, SVP product and marketing at Xchange Telecom (of which Skywire is the business division), observes. “Speed to deploy is very important, but when we tell the landlords we can connect their buildings within two to three weeks, they are dubious. Then we sit down with them and explain how Siklu’s small, innovative radios operate in the abundant and uncongested mmWave spectrum, providing interference-free communication to businesses for all modern commercial needs.”
“We don’t need to dig up the streets like the other guys,” Barbara adds.
Ilan Moshe, GM, Americas at Siklu says the company holds a unique position in its ability to quickly bring high-speed connection to a densely populated city like New York.
“Siklu’s 60, 70/80GHz products are geared towards realizing high-capacity, fiber-like connectivity for the last mile in those dense locations lacking the reach of fiber, and thus prone to interference from the multitude of devices connected close together,” Moshe says.