Tarana Wireless, Inc.

About

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Our Story
Our Story

Tarana’s co-founders set out to rethink fixed wireless access in 2009. Through a decade of R&D and over $400M of investment, Tarana created ngFWA — an entirely new technology built from the ground up to deliver reliable, high-speed residential broadband. Gigabit 1 (G1), our ngFWA platform, overcomes previously insurmountable industry challenges for service providers in every market to deliver better broadband more efficiently. G1 started production in mid-2021 and has since been embraced by more than 200 service providers in 21 countries and 45 US states.

Founded in 2009, Tarana’s mission is to accelerate the deployment of fast, affordable internet access around the world. Through a decade of R&D and over $400M of investment, the Tarana team has created a unique next-generation fixed wireless access (ngFWA) technology instantiated in its first commercial platform, Gigabit 1 (G1). It delivers a game-changing advance in broadband economics in both mainstream and underserved markets, using either licensed or unlicensed spectrum. G1 started production in mid-2021 and has since been embraced by more than 200 service providers in 21 countries. Tarana is headquartered in Milpitas, California, with additional research and development in Pune, India.

A Deeper Dive, by Subject

Want to know more about Tarana? Expand the categories below to gain a deeper understanding of our company, industry, and more.

The Company

Our mission is to accelerate the deployment of fast, reliable, and affordable internet access and to close the global digital divide sooner than previously thought possible.

G1 (and successors in progress). The world’s first next-generation fixed wireless access platform, which introduces a complete revolution in delivering real broadband service at mass scale in a fraction of the time and cost of current alternatives.

Cloud management for G1 installations — equally revolutionary in configuring, controlling, providing intelligent visibility into, and troubleshooting complex network operations.

Over 200 internet service providers in 21 countries, coming from all categories (incumbents and new entrants, large and small, wireless and wireline in origin, licensed spectrum and not).

An extraordinarily talented, high-functioning, and quickly-growing crew of over 400, endowed with 23 PhDs and 74 masters degrees among them.

Tarana is headquartered in Milpitas, California, with additional research and development in Pune, India.

Our exec team is applying an outstanding combination of experiences driving hyper-scaled commercial success in tech (at Amazon, DISH, Infinera, Nokia, Ruckus, and Xircom) as well as fundamental advances in radio network technology (at ArrayComm, BeamReach, Qualcomm, and Tarana). Their roles and bios appear below.

We raised $170M in March, 2022 at a $1B valuation from three excellent co-leads (Axon Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Prime Movers Lab) along with a number of large institutional investors. We raised an additional $50M in growth capital in mid 2023 from Digital Alpha Advisors as part of their innovative investment approach in fixed wireless. Meanwhile our revenues and margins are rising steadily, putting us in a strong position for further investment in growth.
Our Market

The network performance and economics of our new approach to broadband make it a good fit for subscribers across a wide range of market conditions and household densities — but we’re leaving very remote areas with essentially no infrastructure (and the oceans) to satellites, and super-dense apartment building neighborhoods to fiber or rooftop microwave radios.

Our detailed, country-by-country analysis of the world’s broadband challenges and opportunities indicates a total addressable market (TAM) for ngFWA measured in many 10s of $B. As we note on our mission page, 80% of the world’s 2.3B households need a new fixed access solution.

Competition​

Designed from the ground up specifically for ngFWA, G1 delivers fiber-class broadband over non-line-of-sight links, in unlicensed spectrum (enabled by a true industry first in interference cancellation), at a fraction of fiber’s cost and time to deploy. No other wireless technology can do all this. Our network economics are 3x better than 5G at FWA.

(1) Oodles of substantive and well-patented inventions in wireless signal processing; (2) custom silicon essential to G1’s economics it would take multiple years for anyone else to replicate (which couldn’t start till after the years they’d need to first catch up on item (1)); and (3) meanwhile, we’re aggressively developing our next platform and inventing even more incredible new approaches to wireless performance.

Fiber is great when you can string it over short distances for free on power or telephone poles (or trees, in the developing world). In most other situations, though, it’s harder and more time-consuming to install than you’d like. There, fiber + Tarana is a much better plan.

The 3GPP 4G and 5G standards were architected to serve a few gigabytes/month to mobile devices in expensive licensed mid-band spectrum. As a result, 3GPP network economics are inherently incompatible with the delivery of the currently terabyte-scale monthly tonnage demanded by typical fixed household subscribers. Outside small-household pockets in secondary markets with low mobile spectrum loading, mobile operator prioritization of fixed service in licensed spectrum (with ~50x lower ARPU per GB consumed) cannot be justified in the long term.

Despite lots of excitement about Starlink and its companions in the low-earth orbit scene, the raw realities of broadband demand density in mainstream markets and resulting network capacity requirements are generally beyond the reach of satellite ventures. Given LEO systems’ orbital geometry, capacity, and coverage area per satellite — along with the unavoidable fact that 71% of the planet is covered by water — their utility in closing the world’s residential digital divide will be limited to areas with fewer than 1 HH per km2. This puts the LEOs in a useful but necessarily peripheral role for closing the global divide at scale.

Wi-Fi suppliers have been following form in their enthusiastic advertisement of very high link speeds theoretically achievable with Wi-Fi 6 and (coming soon) 7. In the real world of outdoor applications, neither 6 nor 7 add any of the core capabilities required to deliver reliable fiber-class broadband at scale in unlicensed spectrum, particularly in the domain of self- and external interference mitigation.

Our Work

From the very beginning, we’ve had a strong bias toward just getting great work done together and away from corporate dysfunction in its many forms. We’re all committed to keeping it that way as we grow.

Our technical team continues to break new architectural ground for the industry in radio networks, massive real-time processing in custom silicon, and AI/ML-powered cloud network management. Scaling our hardware manufacturing from scratch amid challenging global supply-chain conditions and our rapid growth has required heroic efforts, with more to come as take the next steps on our product roadmap. Our growing marketing, sales, and support teams are hustling to respond to high growth in interest, demand, and deployments as well.

Extraordinarily so. We’re changing people’s lives for the better all around the world. We sometimes joke that we don’t need a corporate social responsibility program, because we ARE a social responsibility program.

Our Future

Yes. We’re continuing to expand our team, so there’s lots of opportunity for more gifted people to come help make a huge difference for the world, and enjoy a truly unique journey with us along the way!

Awards

Tarana has earned recognition for significant advancements in the fixed wireless space and our impact on underserved communities since the commercial launch of G1 in 2021. We are honored to have won the following awards:

  • 2023 WISPA Awards
    • Manufacturer of the Year
    • Product of the Year (Our G1 Platform)
    • President’s Award (awarded to Carl Guardino, our VP of Gov Affairs and Policy)

Executive Team

Dirk Gates

SVP of Customer Experience

Andy Hill

VP of Operations

Yongmin Zhang

VP of Engineering

Sri Reddy

President & COO

Sud Verma

VP of Product Development

Carl Guardino

VP of Government Affairs & Policy

Sergiu Nedevschi

CSO & Co-Founder

Rabin Patra

Chief SW Architect & Co-Founder

Harry May

VP of RF Engineering

Dale Branlund

CTO & Co-Founder

Rakesh Tiwari

VP of Product Management & Solutions Engineering

Kamaraj Karuppiah

VP of Software, Signal Processing

Steven Glapa

VP of Marketing

Eric Rebeiz

VP of Systems Engineering and Architecture

Board of Directors

Interested in getting started with G1?