P-Com Corporation was a
manufacturer of
point-to-point and
point-to-multipoint radios in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The company banked on providing
wireless local loop and bandwidth facilities to
metropolitan
Metropolitan may refer to:
* Metropolitan area, a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories
* Metropolitan borough, a form of local government district in England
* Metropolitan county, a typ ...
and remote areas, using fixed
antennas and
Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology. At its peak, the company had operations at
Campbell, California,
Melbourne, Florida, the
United Kingdom, and an active client presence in
Argentina. The company stock had an
IPO
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
of $25 in the late 1990s: by the mid-2000s, this had become a
penny stock, and several waves of layoffs decimated the workforce by that time.
P-Com acquired the wireless division of Cylink Corporation in early 1998, rebranding as P-Com Wireless Access Group, and incorporating the M100 and M400 products of its earlier acquisition ACS.
A number of UK staff, including senior management and engineers left P-Com in 2002 to set up rival Fresnel Microwave Systems. Fresnel was later purchased by Centerpoint Corporation.
Faced with fierce competition to its millimeter-wave point-to-point products, the company re-focused itself on the license-free product line and the expertise it had acquired from Cylink in 1998. Rival Wave Wireless of Sarasota FL was purchased in 2005, and P-Com restructured and rebranded itself Wave Wireless in 2005.
Wave Wireless contracted with B&B Test Solutions to manufacture all of their SpeedLAN wireless products. In November, 2006, B&B Test Solutions acquired the AirPro Gold “carrier class” wireless product line from Wave Wireless. In August, 2007, B&B Test Solutions acquired all of the rights to the SpeedLAN product line from Wave Wireless, which appears to have ceased operations.
In October 2009, B&B Test Solutions/Wave Wireless were acquired by Mountain Optech, who have then changed their name to Mountain Secure Systems.
Trivia
The "P" stood for "Personal" in the name. The company was formed in California (fact: 7/09).
References
Business
1999 report of use of P-Com hardware by WinStar "since 1994"2000 report of use of P-Com hardware in ArgentinaP-Com profile from ~2002
Amateur radio
24 GHz SSB Conversion of the P-Com Tel-Link 23 GHz ODU
Footnotes
{{Reflist
Networking companies of the United States
Defunct manufacturing companies of the United States