Tuesday, June 26, 2007

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A New Bird Joins The Airborne Broadband Flock

With Boeing's pioneer airborne broadband effort Connexion crashing last year (TelecomWeb news break, Aug. 17, 2006), another company has emerged to fill the void. A little-known outfit called Voyant is sitting on what looks to be a good quarter-billion dollars or more worth of technology to do the job.

Here's why almost everybody in the industry never heard of Voyant: Up until April 27, the company was called Zeros & Ones Inc. Zeros became Voyant as part of a corporate rebirth that included a new business plan, a new management team and some rebranding.

A big part of that new business plan is to get into the airborne broadband business. What Voyant is doing is melding broadband technology it owns with so-called "cognitive" radio technology from Adapt4 LLC. That technology allows the "harvesting" of unused capacity in licensed frequency bands and re-use of the harvested capacity. In the Voyant/Adapt4 scheme, that re-use will be for airborne broadband.

Voyant also owns a content-delivery technology called "RocketStream," and one of the secrets to the airborne stew its brewing is leveraging revenue-generating content as well as selling plain old broadband services.

One caveat is that, at this point, what Voyant and Adapt4 have is a letter of intent, not a product ready for market. The company's big advantage is that it's picked up better than a quarter of a billion dollars of technology for what could be mere pennies on the dollar - a typical high-tech situation that sometimes pays big dividends. It remains to be seen whether Voyant is one of those that makes it pay or whether one of the other emerging players in airborne broadband will be the big winner.

To learn more about Voyant, read today's full text in TelecomWeb news break's sister e-letter Broadband Business Forecast at http://www.telecomweb.com/news/broadband.