Little waves could
mean big business

COURTESY LOEA CORP. Daniel Scharre heads Loea Corp., a Maui manufacturer of wireless communications equipment used by agencies including the University of Hawaii. Daniel L. Scharre » Named president and chief executive of Loea Corp., a Maui-based maker of specialized wireless communications equipment that was spun off in 2001 by parent company Trex Enterprises Corp. of San Diego. » He formerly served as president and chief executive of Larscom Inc., a computer-network equipment maker that was sold to Madison, Ala.-based Verilink Corp. in mid-2004. Scharre has more than two decades of telecommunications experience.

Where do millimeter waves lie on the spectrum? Between microwaves and traditional radio?

It's higher frequency than microwaves. Waves and frequency are inverse.

As you get higher and higher frequency you get smaller and smaller wavelength. A microwave wavelength is more like a meter. Light would be higher frequency than millimeter. You've got FM and AM radios, then microwave, then millimeter, then light. Millimeter waves won't go through buildings. They will go through windows. Anything higher than cell phone frequencies will have trouble going through a building.

Where has your technology been used?

With University of Hawaii we've got this link between Coconut Island in Kaneohe Bay and Windward Community College. ... One of the reasons this has been useful is UH had problems recruiting researchers in marine biology until they got this link in ... so that you could have much more ability to do the computer processing and so on once you got the data back from Coconut Island.

The Coast Guard and Navy are using it. People who have bought the equipment have a need to get across a harbor or river or downtown area where there's no place to dig up the street to put the fiber in.

The coast guard has a couple links between Sand Island and the federal building in Honolulu.

Any luck breaking into commercial sales?

The company hasn't really approached commercial customers yet. There's a couple reasons. The technology is just getting to the point where one can go to communications customers and say the technology is reliable enough where a bank or insurance company can put a link in place and not worry about the integrity of the data. Loea petitioned the FCC to get all this spectrum.

The final rules didn't get in place until the beginning of this year. There was no way to have a commercial link because the licenses weren't available yet. My job is twofold. One is to take us from an R&D organization to a commercial production organization.

The second job is to get out there into the marketplace and deal with the SBCs and Verizons and AT&Ts and carriers. If you've got a major financial institution or hospital or university that wants to connect local buildings ... this is the perfect way to do it without having to pay huge amounts of money to a service provider.

What's the cost?

Today a link is on the order of $60,000 point to point. That's for a gigabit per second.

If you look at how much you might put into 100 megabits per second, that's $15,000 to $20,000 a link. Ultimately I believe we're going to have to bring the price down but that takes volume in the marketplace.

Over time I think we're going to get the price down to where it's what people are paying now for 100 megabits a second. In comparison, if you look at the cost of digging up the street to put in cables, you're talking millions of dollars.

The upside of the technology is that it can get through weather and debris. What's the downside?

It does have a limited range. You look at availability. What availability means is all radio communications gets absorbed in heavy rainfall.

Our technology at these frequencies will go a couple kilometers at 99.999 percent availability.

So if you're only worried about it being able to communicate 99.999 percent you can go 10 kilometers or so. If you are in sunnier climates you're good almost all of the time.

If you're on the eastern side of Maui, you're limited in times that you can communicate. And there is cost.

You're still going to pay more for this technology than you're going to pay for free-space optics (which is based on lasers that transmit information) but I anticipate in two years this will be different.

How many employees at Loea?

Twenty employees. Slightly over half are in Hawaii. We have a contingent in Massachusetts because that's sort of the center of everything for millimeter technology, and then we have a couple people in California.