From two young engineers forming Intel nearly fifty years ago, to software programmers at Facebook leaving to build a question-and-answer website, the story of Silicon Valley is largely the story of engineers leaving large corporations to strike it out on their own. One group of engineers was following that script when they departed Qualcomm Aetheros to build a better Wi-Fi router.
The router is known as Portal and the secret to its unique design is an area of wireless spectrum in the 5 GHz range seldom used by other routers. While most routers only access one or two channels in that frequency band, the router grants access to six different channels, helping devices to avoid crowded Wi-Fi by jumping between channels. More channels means that individual devices have more bandwidth to play around with.
“Our engineers created Portal to fundamentally redefine the consumer Wi-Fi experience,” says Terry Ngo, chief executive of Ignition Design Labs, the company behind Portal. “We give you three times more spectrum for faster video downloads, elimination of buffering issues, and an improved overall internet experience.”
Ignition Design Labs built their new router under the notion that most other routers fail to address the main problem with Wi-Fi. Billions of devices compete for limited spectrum, especially in cities and apartment buildings, and all that competition causes traffic jams that slow down Wi-Fi. That problem is heightened by the fact that people are using Wi-Fi for applications that consume huge amounts of data, like streaming video and playing video games.
That is one of the reasons that the 5 GHz spectrum has slowly become prime real estate for wireless technologies. Devices like Google’s OnHub router are breaking ground in the spectrum to avoid overcrowding in the 2.4 GHz band. Qualcomm and other chipmakers are increasingly using the spectrum to offload cellular data with LTE in the unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U) and Licensed Assisted Access.
Ignition Design Labs was only given regulatory access to the rest of the 5 GHz spectrum—which was originally reserved for weather radar systems—with some caveats. The company had to ensure that wireless signals on the unused lanes would not interfere with radar signals. Normally, devices must use dynamic frequency selection to sidestep radar in these channels, which account for roughly 65% of the entire 5 GHz spectrum in North America, and around 80% in Europe and Japan. But that technology is complex and expensive, and so has been largely ignored by Wi-Fi equipment companies.
