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Tech

Aereo Founder Says He Can Bring You Gigabit Internet at Home

If former Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia gets his way, you might soon be saying goodbye to your existing home broadband provider.
Image: Starry

The man who tried to turn the television industry upside down with Aereo now has home broadband in his sites.

Announced on Wednesday in New York City, Starry promises to deliver wireless broadband access to consumers for less than what they're paying traditional home broadband providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Consisting of two components—the wireless internet service itself, called Starry Internet, and a touch screen home Wi-Fi router called Starry Station—Starry is perfectly pitched, said CEO Chet Kanojia, to bring much needed choice to the home broadband market.

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"The crux of the issue is there's no competition," said Kanojia, who formerly served as the CEO of Aereo, the ill-fated startup that, before a crippling Supreme Court decision in June 2014, allowed consumers to stream over-the-air television to their computer or mobile device using a broadband connection. In Kanojia's view, there's no competition in the home broadband market because of the sheer costs involved with building out a wired broadband network. Unless you're someone like Google, Kanojia reasoned, with billions of dollars at the ready to devote to building out such networks, creating a wired home broadband network is simply out of the question.

That's why you go wireless.

Kanojia's company, which is financially backed by several big name investors like FirstMark Capital and Tiger Global (among others), will affix transmitters (called "MetroNodes") to buildings that then wirelessly broadcast Starry Internet service to customers up to two kilometers away. Kanojia did not say exactly how many of these transmitters would be needed to bring Starry Internet to Boston, where the service will debut as a beta this summer, but agreed it would be "a lot." These transmitters, Kanojia told me, in turn get their internet access from local fiber optic internet providers.

To connect to Starry Internet, users must place an antenna (called "Starry Point") in a location where there's clear access to the signal, such as a windowsill. The $350 Starry Station router then connects to that antenna, beaming high-speed Wi-Fi around the house that you can then use to connect as many smartphones, tablets, and other devices as you've got laying around. Starry Internet's speeds will top out at one gigabit (the same as Google Fiber), with no data caps or other methods of network management (like throttling or traffic shaping) in place, Kanojia told me. Beyond optional parental controls, there's no content filtering of any kind—it's "pure internet," Kanojia told me.

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It should also be pointed out that these Starry Station routers don't communicate with each like you'd see with wireless mesh networks being built by organizations like NYC Mesh; it's an A-and-B conversation between the transmitter and the user's antenna. Kanojia told me the performance of mesh networks isn't sufficient for what Starry is trying to offer.

On the surface, all of this sounds like a great deal: super fast Wi-Fi with no data caps, all without having to deal with the hated cable companies. That said, there are still some questions that Starry isn't answering just yet.

For one, Starry Internet was not up and running in the New York City announcement venue, so I could not, say, connect to a Starry Station router to run a speed test on my own. (There were demo unit routers peppered throughout the venue, but these were present to show off the touchscreen's user interface, which displays things like the number of devices connected to the network and the strength of the wireless signal.) So for now we'll have to take Kanojia's word for it that his technology works as seamlessly as promised.

Another question is cost. While we know that the Starry Station router will cost $350 (ok, technically $349.99), we don't know how much the Starry Internet service will cost—kind of an important detail for a company that's looking to upend the cable company monopoly on broadband. Now, when pressed, Kanojia admitted that "the entire point" of his company was to offer low-cost, high-speed internet access, saying that it would be "way" cheaper than the $70 per month that Google Fiber costs.

Another concern is the question of access, with Kanojia saying that "this generation" of Starry's technology is optimized for small, densely packed urban areas. A different kind of wireless technology would be needed to spread broadband across the long stretches of land found in the suburbs, he said. Not that this matters much at the outset, since Starry Internet will initially only be available in Boston sometime this summer, though additional cities are tentatively scheduled to come online before the end of the year.

Overall, there's much to be excited about Starry, which offers the dream of uncapped home gigabit internet access likely at affordable rates. And unlike his infamous previous startup, Kanojia doesn't anticipate any legal challenges derailing his plans.

"When you start a company the focus is on what asymmetrical advantage that you have [over your competitors]," Kanojia said. "Last time [Aereo] it was a regulatory advantage we were developing, but this time it's purely a technological advantage… No, I don't see any legal problem."