Pivotal Commware Touts Holographic Beamforming as 5G Coverage Tool
Posted on January 12, 2018
Fresh off a $17.9 million Series A round of funding, wireless startup Pivotal Commware is hoping to take its state-of-the-art holographic beamforming technology from trials to commercial deployments. The company is currently testing its technology in two Tier 1 carriers’ 4G networks, but it hopes to play an even bigger role in 5G networks.
On the sidelines of the CES 2018 conference, Pivotal Commware CEO Brian Deutsch told SDxCentral that the company’s holographic beamforming builds on phased-array beamforming technology that has been around for many years. However, holographic beamforming, which Deutsch calls “beams-as-a-service,” addresses the shortfalls in existing beamforming technology by using software-enabled antennas to narrow the beams so they have better propagation. That also leads to less interference. And because the beams are so precisely pinpointed, the same frequency of spectrum can be reused, which in turn makes for a much more efficient use of the spectrum.