The company's sales and service are now more focused on these infrastructure opportunities which the company is pursuing based upon achievements to date with deployments of its product and the demand that the company believes is apparent in the domestic and international market it serves. In the international market, the company expects to take advantage of opportunities in those countries where it has achieved market penetration and where it has successfully pioneered rule making in the 70 and 80 GHz spectrum for commercial use. These opportunities include the Middle East and North African (MENA) and European Community markets.
In order to implement this new strategy, GigaBeam says it has consolidated operations, research and development and customer service activities at its Research Triangle Park location in North Carolina. GigaBeam's primary manufacturing facility remains in Sunnyvale, California, while its corporate headquarters is to be transitioned to North Carolina. The Company has realigned its staffing to effectively execute this new strategy.
Lou Slaughter, Chairman and CEO of GigaBeam, stated "We have identified substantial market opportunities for our WiFiber product based upon the successful deployments to date, customer applications of our product and the response from the marketplace. This positive feedback is driving our new 'go-to-market' strategy. This new strategy allows us to take advantage of the significant potential of our technology to support the build out of wireless telecommunications infrastructures on a global scale. The consolidation and refocus of our operating activities enables us to more cost-effectively support our customers and the implementation of this strategy."
He added, "These changes have enabled us to substantially reduce the level of cash used for recurring operating expenses of the company. We expect this new strategy to benefit the company financially and positively impact the company's operating results."
Lou Slaughter added, "Among our current domestic efforts in the United States is a project located in a western city where our customer, a communications service provider, is installing a city-wide WiFiber infrastructure at significant lower cost than using terrestrial fiber to provide an equivalent infrastructure. The customer has already purchased and successfully deployed 11 links from the Company and is expected to acquire additional links in the near future to build out their infrastructure.
"In the MENA region we see similar opportunities to build out city-wide infrastructures by both enterprises and government entities," he said. Gigabeam will also continue to sell to enterprise and government customers which can effectively utilize the company's technology for various high bandwidth applications, in addition to city-wide infrastructure build outs. These aforementioned opportunities support our new strategy."
GigaBeam WiFiber products operate in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz upper millimeter wave spectrum bands. This portion of the spectrum has been authorized by the Federal Communications Commission and the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) for wireless licensed wireless commercial use. Use of these frequency bands for commercial use was pioneered by GigaBeam's founders.
GigaBeam's technology, utilizing these large blocks of contiguous spectrum, enables multi-Gigabit-per-second communications through use of Gigabit Ethernet and other standard protocols. The current speed achieved by GigaBeam's WiFiber G-1.25 product series is full duplex at one Gigabit-per-second (equivalent to 647 T1 lines or 1,000 DSL connections) which supports GigE protocol. GigaBeam previously announced its WiFiber G-2.7 series, to be released in the first half of 2007, and which will operate at 2.7 Gbps. The protocols to be supported by the G-2.7 product series include 2 x GigE (2 x 1 Gbps); OC-48 / STM-16 (2.488 Gbps); SMPTE 292M (1.485 Gbps) and both 1 and 2 Gbps fiber channel. GigaBeam also plans deployment of future products capable of 10 Gigabits-per-second utilizing either the 10 Gigabit Ethernet or OC-192 protocol standards.
GigaBeam's WiFiber technology is similar to terrestrial fiber in terms of speed and reliability. WiFiber has a substantial advantage over terrestrial fiber because WiFiber can be deployed in a day and costs less to deploy than terrestrial fiber. Terrestrial fiber can take months to deploy and also require significant regulatory and environmental approvals prior to installation.
