By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
What if you could rely on Wi-Fi mesh for multiple hops with very little latency increase, instant re-routing, and little throughput degradation? Now you can. PicoCELA’s ultra-reliable mesh Wi-Fi has become the defacto standard for large construction sites in Japan and the company is already expanding into manufacturing and logistics, even hotels and retail. The company was listed on the NASDAQ in January of this year.
Wi-Fi mesh for the home has been popular among consumers for more than a decade but when it comes to the enterprise, adoption of Wi-Fi mesh has generally been modest. Now Japan’s PicoCELA is reinventing mesh for the enterprise with wide-area coverage, extreme reliability, and scale – and the company is already widely successful in Japan with more than 20,000 APs installed. PicoCELA’s secret sauce is the ‘PicoCELA Backhaul Engine’ (PBE) that redefines Wi-Fi mesh architecture and performance.
“We believe that standardized mesh technologies fall short of meeting the technical and operational requirements for enterprise-grade applications. This limitation has hindered the widespread adoption of what should be a highly beneficial technology. PicoCELA’s PBE breaks down technical barriers, unlocking plenty of use cases that were previously abandoned due to technical or financial constraints,” says Hiroshi Furukawa, Founder and CEO, PicoCELA Inc
For example: PicoCELA’s PBE backhaul increases latency by only 2 milliseconds per hop, which means real-time applications are readily supported. More than ten mesh hops are possible within a ‘dynamic tree topology’, which intelligently reroutes traffic in seconds if necessary to maintain stability. Unlike traditional systems where throughput can significantly deteriorate after a few hops, PicoCELA’s PBE minimises this degradation, ensuring robust performance across many hops, Hiroshi Furukawa says.
“PicoCELA is a real alternative to wired Wi-Fi networks that in practice can only be extended with maybe 2-3 mesh hops. We’ve done away with the limitations so that entire enterprise networks can now be deployed as a mesh, delivering stable and reliable Wi-Fi,” he says. PicoCELA’s product portfolio includes outdoor ruggedised APs with optional directional antennas for a range of up to 1 kilometre while Indoor AP models are also available and compliant with FCC as well as EU (CE) standards, the company says.
The PBE supports a dynamic mesh topology by allowing moving nodes to roam freely within a mesh cluster. This happens through instantaneous route changes that take place without connection breaks, ensuring a seamless transition as nodes move. This unique feature enables devices to maintain a consistent connection even while their location and the network’s structure are in flux, the company says.
“Our approach dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of network deployment, especially in environments where traditional wiring is difficult, expensive, or impossible. For example, for construction sites, industrial plants, or mines, deploying surveillance cameras or connecting automated vehicles can be done wirelessly without the need for costly trenching or extensive cabling, cutting installation time from weeks to mere minutes or days,” Atsushi Kondo, General Manager, Global Business Development, PicoCELA Inc.
In Japan, the market for industrial-grade communications has responded enthusiastically to PicoCELA’s innovations. In Tokyo, one of Japan’s largest construction sites has deployed 300+ PicoCELA APs to connect mobile devices, robotic equipment, surveillance cameras, and IoT sensors across 64 floors. Nippon Express – one of Japan’s largest logistics companies – uses PicoCELA mesh to connect autonomous mobile robots (AMR) in warehouses, while two kilometres of underground mall in Fukouka, Japan, was covered with only 27 PicoCELA APs of which only four were connected with LAN cables. PicoCELA Wi-Fi is also being used together with Starlink satellite backhaul to set up disaster response connectivity network in just 15 minutes, the company says.
PicoCELA says next steps are expanding its business to the US, Asia, Africa, and the EU. In May 2025 the company was awarded a feasibility study grant from UNIDO – a UN organization – for a telecom reconstruction project in Ukraine. This is PicoCELA’s first project outside Japan.
/Claus.
