News and Blog

Words can’t adequately describe what we all experienced in 2020. In early March and through the spring and summer, NYC was at the epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis.

Early on, a number of our employees (including me) had the virus. Fortunately, we all got through the first wave in good shape. For months, most businesses either moved to remote working or shut down, thereby leaving the city as a ghost town. The sounds of sirens filled the air around our offices in Brooklyn, only interrupted by the loud clanking of the pots and pans at 7PM each night by our citizens thanking our nurses, doctors and first responders.

I recently read a thoroughly researched article titled – “It’s 2020: Why Is The Internet Still Treated Like A Luxury, Not A Utility?” As the CEO of Skywire Networks, not only have I been asking this same question for many years, but I have worked with my team over the past 6 years to build an internet network throughout NYC, especially in the “fiber poor” outer-boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

Early last month, with much fanfare, Apple announced their new 5G iPhone12. As the Apple ads hit the airwaves, not surprisingly so did the ads for Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T all touting their “5G” networks. If you read the fine print, you will realize that a very small portion of the 5G nationwide network is available and operating. There are 20,000 cities in the US and one of the carriers noted that they have lit 2,000 cities or 10%. If you dig a bit deeper, the total populations of these 2,000 cities is less than 1% of the total population. Anyway, these companies want to sell tons of phones and selling a new shiny object like 5G is a great way to do so.

It’s nice to see Starry, a Boston based fixed wireless company focused primarily on the urban MDU space, raise $120 million at a pre-money valuation of $875 million. 

For $50/month, Starry delivers 200MB speeds to residential customers living in apartment buildings initially in Boston and in other cities. Starry, Skywire and other platforms which deliver OTT services are contributing to the massive increase in “cord cutting” which increased to 1 million homes in the fourth quarter.  

For a long time, people looking for an alternative to fiber providers such as Verizon and Time Warner Cable had nowhere to turn to. As Daryl Schoolar, a principal analyst at OVUM, a market research and consulting firm, has noted, “For more than a decade, there has been great interest in operators using fixed wireless access, or microwave, as a viable ‘last-mile’ technology”, despite the fact that such technology was at the time unstable under certain conditions. But providers persevered, and fixed wireless access (also known as FWA) has become an increasingly popular option in both densely populated cities such as New York and rural areas in places like Oklahoma and Iowa.