By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Today’s Wi-Fi access points are enormously wasteful because they spray RF energy everywhere – and only very little of it is ever turned into useful received signals. The answer – says Canada-based startup LATYS – is the use of ‘intelligent spatial multiplexing’ and ‘non-reciprocal meta-surface antennas’. The first product in this entirely new category of RF devices is aimed at fixing Wi-Fi dead zones, the company says.
What if you could direct RF power to exactly where you needed it instead of spraying it all over? The startup LATYS is founded on this exact idea: Using smart RF lenses and mirrors to deliver better RF performance and much better energy efficiency, potentially leading to much fewer APs. The company’s vision is to rethink and transform how wireless networks – including Wi-Fi – are designed and delivered.
“Using space as a resource and applying spacial diversity is key to delivering a host of connectivity benefits. Our goal is to develop our technology and apply it to an array of RF performance and efficiency pain points that are otherwise hard to elegantly solve for by other means,” says Artmiz Golkaramnay, Founder & VP of Product & Business Development at LATYS.
LATYS is currently in the early phases of developing their first products. The company’s technology is based on a series of patents acquired by the University of Toronto, Canada, describing reflective and non-reciprocal beam-steering meta surfaces, which can be loosely described as RF lenses and mirrors that in practice look a little like phased antenna arrays.
Although the technology is RF protocol agnostic – and could also be applied to example 5G or future 6G radio – LATYS has for now identified fixing Wi-Fi dead zones as their go-to-market point of entry. “Our solution expands and improves – for example – Wi-Fi coverage within a large warehouse or office, and we’re already trialling that with a couple of service providers. It is also highly relevant for improving coverage in hard-to-reach or poorly covered areas, such parking lots and the like,” Artmiz Golkaramnay says.
In addition to improving Wi-Fi performance, sustainability is anther important benefit of Latys’ technology. The company’s modeling indicates a potential power savings of a factor of eight compared to other solutions, simply because the LATYS solution is lighter and contains much fewer electronic components than other products on the market, the company says.
LATYS is already demonstrating how their new LATYS FOCUS device can help extend and improve coverage for example in a parking garage, when only a single AP at is used to light up Wi-Fi for the area from one end. Two LATYS devices can be used to substantially extend Wi-Fi coverage and deliver improved data rates. In the demonstration case the solution boosted bitrates by a factor of ten (from 6 to 58 Mbps) through 10 dB signal gains across much of a 53-meter-long garage (see heat map image below).
The company says the plan is to complement the LATYS FOCUS repeater ‘network enhancement hardware’ with installation planning software as well as post-deployment optimisation software with the aim of commercialising products this year. LATYS is based in Montreal, Canada and will be participating in Wi-Fi World Congress USA 2024 in Sarasota, Florida.
/Claus.
