Aereo Founder Now Wants To Offer Wireless Gigabit Broadband Service

While Aereo — the startup that offered online access to freely available over-the-air broadcast TV networks — may have been gutted by a 2014 Supreme Court ruling, its founder and CEO Chet Kanojia soldiers on. His latest project: Wireless high-speed broadband for your home.

Kanojia, along with some of the same people that created Aereo, has announced the launch of a new service called Starry that uses extremely high-frequency radio waves to carry large amounts of data at high speeds.

According to Starry, the service will deliver up to one gigabit to customers. That’s the same speed as Google fiber, but without the need to physically connect your property to a new network.

Instead, Starry users would purchase a Starry Station, a self-install wireless receiver. With its touch-screen display, the Station is intended as both a connecting point to the Starry network and an information center for the user’s home.

“The future of connectivity is wireless and having simple, affordable access to an Internet connection is imperative for every household and business,” says Kanojia in a statement. “But, far too many people don’t have a choice in how they access that connection. We set out to build an innovative alternative to wired broadband using millimeter waves and proprietary technology to deliver ultra high speed broadband to your home, wirelessly. With Starry’s technology, we can deploy and scale faster than traditional wired networks – at a fraction of the cost.”

Starry is planning to launch a beta test of the service in Boston this summer, followed by rollouts to additional markets. The company has not announced the price for Starry service, but has put a $349 price tag on the Station.

One thing that Starry has committed to is that the service will not have any data caps, which goes against the current trend from the nation’s largest Internet providers.

We have no idea if Starry works or if it will be released at a consumer-friendly price, but we hope it’s just the beginning of a sea change in broadband competition.

Whether it’s Starry or some other company, there is a real need for broadband competition in the U.S.. If federal regulators allow the currently pending merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter, it would mean that around 70% of high-speed Internet connections in the country would be controlled by only two companies.

The cable operators claim that wireless broadband from cellphone companies is an adequate competitor for cable and fiber connections, but most wireless access plans come with strict data caps and harsh overage fees, meaning that you would have to spend several times more to access the same amount of data wirelessly.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist