This seems to have been coming for a long time...
Dana Spiegel
Executive Director
NYCwireless
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.NYCwireless.net
+1 917 402 0422
Read the Wireless Community blog: http://www.wirelesscommunity.info
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Vivato Ceases Operations: Breaking News
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By Glenn Fleishman
Special to Wi-Fi Networking News
Permanently archived item <http://wifinetnews.com/archives/006144.html>
Breaking news--Vivato has ceased operations according to a company
spokesperson: I just confirmed this minute that early enterprise
wireless switch maker Vivato has shut down. [1] Unstrung was
reporting earlier today that the buzz on the street was a Dec. 20
halt. A reliable source told me this evening that the shutdown had
already occurred, and I was able to confirm it late this evening with
the company.
Vivato made news in Nov. 2002 when John Markoff [2] filed a major
business story in The New York Times about the then-revolutionary
product that Vivato was slated to introduce the next year. The
company's braintrust was extolled, and the firm had prototypes to
show off. In the months that followed, they offered extensive
demonstrations of their technology, which involved a phased-array
antenna that was intended to control and receive signals
intelligently, steering Wi-Fi to users and being highly receptive to
distant transmitters.
The demonstration worked terrifically. A number of San Francisco-
based journalists and community wireless advocates put a
demonstration switch to the test and were quite honestly amazed. But
in practice, the multi-thousand-dollar gateway couldn't be put into
effective production.
Delays dogged the company as, according to reports I received, the
units coming off the production line were incapable of achieving the
expensive, handmade prototypes' characteristics. Originally, the
system was billed as delivering three simultaneous steered beams
across entire floors of buildings from indoor placement or entire
sides of buildings from outdoor locations, but that appears to have
been impossible to achieve.
I knew that Vivato might not be able to deliver because a major PR
effort to broadcast Wi-Fi across Central Park quietly failed for
technical reasons--it was never announced publicly and those involved
didn't want to talk about it. At the same time, normally straight-
talking people within the company couldn't give me a clear and frank
answer as to delays in production.
The firm reportedly created an inventory of its 802.11b switches
which came on the market just after 802.11g hit ratification, making
them obsolete for enterprise purposes on delivery. The inventory of
that first-generation device were unsellable at retail because of
performance and the 802.11g issue. A number of gateways were sold off
around the country to smaller firms, colleges, and institutions at
bargain prices. Several colleges I've spoken with have one or two
Vivato 802.11b gateways for lighting up arenas or other outdoor spaces.
An 802.11g switch took a while to produce, but it limited claims to a
single steered channel when it shipped in 2004. They paired this
switch with a much cheaper bridge that would fill in niches that the
main device couldn't cover. Between shipping their 802.11b and
802.11g switches and thereafter, founders, key executives, and
engineers left the company. The firm refocused on outdoor markets,
like ports and stadiums.
As Vivato's first and later products came to market, another firm was
gaining interest: Airgo. Airgo's multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO)
technology--also first [3] reported by Markoff in the Times 10 months
after his Vivato piece--would turn out to be cheaper and simpler than
Vivato's approach, and, more importantly, the first generation of the
chips in products shipped in late 2004 and worked as advertised.
While a single MIMO gateway can't cover an entire floor of a
business, a single Vivato gateway can't serve enough users; Vivato's
monolithic approach wasn't compatible with the scale of users,
purposes like VoIP over Wi-Fi, and the throughput that's now demanded
in enterprises. MIMO hasn't penetrated the enterprise yet, but as
part of the 802.11n standard, it's the direction to invest in by
company IT departments.
Simultaneous with the growing awareness of impending MIMO shipments
in 2004 was the maturation of the wireless LAN switch market. WLAN
switches, unlike Vivato's beam-forming antenna, could coordinate
access points located throughout an enterprise. The first devices
generally required a special Layer 2 switch to which the APs had to
be directly connected; that difficulty was relatively quickly
eliminated in most products by 2004, which then supported Layer 2
tunneling for APs to be located anywhere on a network and controlled
centrally.
Cisco's acquisition of Airespace, one of the largest revenue-
producing startups, marked the acceptance of that trend into the
mainstream, as did Aruba landing the Microsoft contract for their
main campus and worldwide offices.
Vivato's approach turned out to be the wrong one from so many angles,
although aspects of the first Vivato switch have permeated the market
in a more mature, cheaper, and flexible form.
You can read Wi-Fi Networking News's [4] extensive historical coverage.
[Several links via [5] TechDirt, which has followed Vivato closely]
URLs referenced:
[1] <http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?
doc_id=85790&WT.svl=news2_1>
[2] <http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?
res=FA0C1EFB3B540C7B8DDDA80994DA404482>
[3] <http://www.coe.montana.edu/ee/rwolff/wireless/airgo-wifi.htm>
[4] <http://www.google.com/search?q=vivato+site%
3Awifinetnews.com&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firef
ox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official>
[5] <http://news.techdirt.com/news/wireless/article/6236>
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