Starry Internet is a fixed

wireless broadband Wireless broadband is telecommunications technology that provides high-speed wireless Internet access or computer networking access over a wide area. The term comprises both fixed and mobile broadband. The term broadband Originally the word ...

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privat ...

(ISP or WISP) operated by Starry, Inc., using millimeter-band LMDS connections, sometimes categorized as 5G fixed wireless, to connect its base stations to customer buildings. Starry currently operates within

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

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Denver Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

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, and Columbus, Ohio.

Background and availability

Starry, Inc. was publicly announced in January 2016 by Chaitanya "Chet" Kanojia, who had previously founded

Aereo Aereo was a technology company based in New York City that allowed subscribers to view live and time-shifted streams of over-the-air television on Internet-connected devices. The service opened to customers in March 2012, and was backed by Barr ...

. , it was providing commercial service to a limited number of apartment buildings in the Boston area for $50/month per apartment, promising 200Mbit/s upload and download speeds. , Starry was based in Boston, had about 100 employees, and had raised $63 million of funding. Kanojia claims that Starry's capital cost will be only $25 per home, as compared to $2,500 for cable. Starry announced on July 1st, 2019 that through an FCC spectrum auction, they acquired 104 licenses for 24 GHz millimeter-wave spectrum to cover 51 markets in 25 states. Starry's system operates on the 37.1, 37.3 and 37.5 GHz bands, connecting its base stations ("Starry Beam") to receivers on individual buildings ("Starry Points"). Each base station covers a radius of 1.5 km. Signal propagation is near line-of-sight, not penetrating buildings and windows, and is degraded by foliage or rain, so Starry directs its signal using Multi-user MIMO phased array antennas, and can take advantage of reflections. The base station redistributes its signal within a building using Starry's own

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...

router ("Starry Station").

Critical reception

Analysts are mixed about Starry's prospects. Some point to the failure of

Clearwire Clearwire Corporation (stylized as clearw˙re) was a telecommunications operator which provided mobile and fixed wireless broadband communications services to retail and wholesale customers in the United States, Belgium, Ireland and Spain. Clearw ...

(which operated

WiMAX Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a family of wireless broadband communication standards based on the IEEE 802.16 set of standards, which provide physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC) options. The WiMAX ...

on the 2.5 GHz band), or to technical challenges: "The physics are tough to overcome, and technology has been slow to improve here."Roger Entner, Recon Analytics, as quoted in Stephen Lawson, "With fixed wireless broadband, startup Starry will take on big challenges", '' Computerworld'
29 January 2016
/ref> Others note that if the expected low fixed costs per user are achieved, "they could profitably offer competitive broadband speeds for a fraction of the current price of wired broadband".Craig Moffett of MoffettNathansan, as reported in Jeff Baumgartner, "Low Costs, Dense Markets Critical to Starry’s Success: Analyst", ''Multichannel News''
28 April 2017
/ref>

2022 First Mark Acquisition Corp Merger

In March 2022, Starry Internet completed a SPAC deal with First Mark Acquisition Corp in order to go public.

Financial issues

On 20 October 2022, Starry, Inc., filed a "WARN" notice with New York State's Department of Labor announcing the layoffs of "49 employees" because of "Changes in business operational needs as result of financial difficulties"

On 23 December 2022, commercial real estate company Farley-White announced that it was suing Starry for $120,000 in unpaid rent

External links

Official website

References

Internet service providers of the United States American companies established in 2016 Companies based in Massachusetts Telecommunications companies established in 2016 2016 establishments in Massachusetts