Edgewater Wireless CEO on how 'spectrum slicing' can boost Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi continues to make progress with respect to speed, capacity and lower latencies with Wi-Fi 6E today and, soon, Wi-Fi 7.

One company that's looking beyond the baseline standards to get even more out of Wi-Fi is Edgewater Wireless, a startup that has developed a patented technique called "spectrum slicing" to further improve the efficiency and performance of Wi-Fi.

The general idea is to break the existing Wi-Fi spectrum down into more physical channels in a way that reduces contention and creates efficiencies that, the company estimates based on real-world tests, can improve Wi-Fi performance by seven to 18 times over baseline methods.

Edgewater Wireless, a company that participated in CableLabs' first startup accelerator program, has dabbled in building souped-up access points (APs) for business use cases, with Mediacom Communications among its early partners. But the path forward is likely not going to focus on its own hardware products or solely on the enterprise sector.

Instead, the company will focus on chipsets that utilize its spectrum slicing technology and pursue opportunities in the residential Wi-Fi market in tandem with service providers and device partners.

"We very much believe our core competency is signal processing and the core of spectrum slicing, which is in the silicon," Andrew Skafel, Edgewater Wireless's president and CEO, said on the Light Reading Podcast. "We see ourselves being a silicon provider for use in these residential gateways rather than making the complete device ourselves."

During the podcast, Skafel also discussed the company's spectrum slicing technology in more detail, the company's focus on new products that will use Wi-Fi 7 and how Edgewater plans to become more involved with cable operators and other broadband service providers.

You can download a lightly edited transcript of the podcast here. If you want to skip around and listen, here are a few topics discussed during this podcast:

• An update on the focus of Edgewater's business and a deeper dive into its spectrum slicing technology, including results from recent proof-of-concept trials with a major tier 1 operator (1:15)
• How Edgewater Wireless intends to tie into the Wi-Fi market with service providers and device partners (6:22)
• How Edgewater Wireless intends to follow up its initial focus on the enterprise segment with a foray into the residential market (8:00)
• An update on Edgewater Wireless's connection to CableLabs (14:25)
• How support for Wi-Fi 7 fits into the company's roadmap (18:20)
• Whether the company's spectrum slicing can be applied to CBRS spectrum, should a market opportunity for that open up (23:00)

Related posts:

• Edgewater Wireless wields spectrum slicing to cut into Wi-Fi market
• Edgewater Wireless, CableLabs hook up on dual-channel Wi-Fi
• Edgewater Wireless amps up Wi-Fi spectrum slicing tech licensing efforts
• CableLabs seeks to supercharge Wi-Fi

— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading