In the gleaming but quiet headquarters of a startup called Starry—above the din of Boston’s Downtown Crossing—40 engineers are toiling to achieve a disruptive vision: delivering Internet access to apartments and businesses, cheaply and wirelessly, nearly 100 times faster than the average home connection today.
The idea of gigabit-per-second wireless service to homes has been around for at least 15 years, but technology advancements make the idea far more plausible today. The high-capacity wireless technology involved—known by a chunky piece of jargon, “millimeter wave active phased array”—is now much less expensive and bulky thanks to advances in microelectronics and software.
Telecom giants including Verizon and AT&T are working on the technology, as are Facebook and Google with their efforts to provide fast public Wi-Fi access. Starry’s service, expected to launch this summer, would be the first to use the technology to actually get inside homes and offices.
In July, beta testers in Boston will get a gadget, a little larger than a soda can, containing an antenna unit. They’ll place it on an exterior windowsill; the inside portion of the device will have an Ethernet jack to connect an existing Wi-Fi router, or one of Starry’s making. (The Starry router, called Starry Station, is already on sale and has a Nest-like feel to it; a touch-screen interface displays circles representing consumption levels of devices in the home and other network information.)
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