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Featured Story T-Mobile: We'll be first with 6G, and no to SpaceX MVNO T-Mobile reports Q3 earnings and says it aims to be first with 6G in the US. It also continues to rule out an MVNO deal with SpaceX's Starlink. Cambridge, UK-based CBNG has gone into administration, affecting about 75 jobs, in the wake of Verizon's decision to not use its millimeter wave product for 5G fixed wireless access. UK wireless specialist Cambridge Broadband Networks Group, known as CBNG, has gone out of business after Verizon, its main telco customer, decided not to use its millimeter wave product for 5G fixed wireless access (FWA). The company entered administration in early October but had ceased trading by that time. About 75 employees were let go and its website is taken down. "They had one major customer, and when that major customer decided to go elsewhere, that was the end of the company's business," said Stephen Goderski, partner at PKF Littlejohn and joint administrator of CBNG. Light Reading can confirm the customer was Verizon. The decision to break ties with CBNG was a matter of timing and not being able to meet the deployment pace rather than issues with the company's technology. "Cambridge offered a technology product that complemented our mmWave solution. As production timelines increasingly fell short, we made the decision to end the relationship with the company, in the best interest of our customers and our business," a Verizon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Former CBNG employees contacted by Light Reading declined to comment given the ongoing administration process and commercial confidentiality. Founded in 2000 and based in Cambridge, the company specialized in point-to-multipoint wireless systems for backhaul transport and fixed wireless using local multipoint distribution service (LMDS) and operating in microwave and mmWave bands (which range from 20GHz to 40GHz). It delivered products to more than 100 service providers internationally, notably in Africa. After restructuring in 2020, the company rebranded from Cambridge Broadband Networks Limited to CBNG and pivoted from its legacy offerings to developing a line of 5G standards-based mmWave FWA products. The new VectaStar NR was unveiled in January this year. The first spectrum band supported was 39GHz, for Verizon, with support for other mmWave bands in development such as 28GHz. In April, CBNG opened an office in Richardson, Texas, to support VectaStar NR in the US, and noted it was deployed with a Tier 1 operator, as Fierce Network reported. CBNG's fate is a common tale in telecoms. It is not the first small company to fail after investing in product development to land business with a big telco customer, which is notoriously difficult especially in the radio access network. It's even harder when the radio tech is mmWave with all its propagation challenges [Ed note: hope it doesn’t rain.] "CBNG built a custom 39GHz radio for Verizon…that no one else could use," said Earl Lum, founder of analyst firm EJL Wireless Research. They would have invested in R&D and getting FCC certification for the equipment. "I think that put CBNG under financial duress," he added. "There's no other idiot country in the world that was deploying mmWave other than the United States. We were the poster child of dumb, so that everyone else can learn from our failure," said Lum. Verizon's mmWave strategy appears to be in flux. On the company's earning call this week, CEO Dan Schulman discussed a mmWave "technological breakthrough" that will allow it to deliver 1-Gig FWA services in metro areas. But he did not say what the tech is. Some analysts speculate that he was talking about Starry, which Verizon acquired in March as it looks to grow footprint in the multi-dwelling unit market. An opinion piece on mmWave appeared in Mobile Industry Review at the end of September, written by Paul Wright, CBNG's chief revenue officer. In hindsight, his essay reads like a eulogy. He argues against the industry narrative that writes off mmWave as a technological failure. The well-known challenges in early deployments of line-of-site requirements, signal blockage, environmental attenuation (i.e., rain, fog) and small coverage areas are better viewed as problems with planning assumptions rather than the technology, he asserts. "The physics were never broken. The industry simply had to learn how to design around them," he writes. The case for using mmWave is stronger today with a more mature ecosystem, demand for "precision capacity" as well as better economics and understanding of how to deploy the technology, in his view. mmWave is not a replacement for traditional, lower spectrum bands, but it is positioned to be "an increasingly essential component of next-generation network architecture," he concludes. That will be for other radio suppliers to try.
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