CED TechVenture profile: LUMEOVA, making WiFi lightning fast

As consumers and businesses rush to embrace virtual reality, demand faster speed from their Internet of Things devices and smartphones, and as much-faster 5G networks become a reality, Raleigh startup LUMEOVA believes its technology can make a wireless future even faster.

“Today’s wireless information highways are overcrowded and future growth comes through wireless optical runways,” says LUMEOVA CEO Dr. M. Ali Khatibzadeh.

That’s where LUMEOVA’s technology comes in.

LUMEOVA offers “the difference in speed between driving a car down the highway at 60 mph and flying a commercial jet at 600 mph!”

Backed by grants from the National Science Foundation, the state of North Carolina and the North Carolina State University Daugherty Endowment Fund, LUMEOVA says its patent-pending wireless technology will boost WIFi speeds. With billions of devices utilizing wireless, LUMEOVA believes it can help ensure networks can handle the growing load.

So how fast is IoT and wireless device growth as well as data increasing? LUMEOVA cites a series of statistics from Cisco:

According to Cisco VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, mobile data traffic is forecasted to more than quadruple by 2020 and experience 53% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) during the next 5 years.
IDC forecasts that over 2 billion smartphones and tablets will be sold annually by 2018.
Current generation WiFi (802.11ac) devices today can support up to 0.8 Giga-bits-per-second (Gbps) data throughput. New generation WiFi (802.11ax) can deliver 1.7 Gbps over existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz unlicensed bands.
Next-generation 5G radio cellular technology is being defined to deliver 1 Gbps data connectivity and enhanced services to mobile devices.
Live streaming of ultra-high-definition (4K) video without compression and loss of quality requires nearly 20 Gbps connectivity

The company is among the startups presenting at CED Tech Venture.

Its founder and CEO is Dr. M. Ali Khatibzadeh, a graduate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and veteran of the wireless semiconductor industry.

Here’s a Q&A profile of LUMEOVA, part of a series featuring CED Tech Venture presenters from WRAL TechWire:

What is the focus of your business?

LUMEOVA is developing ultra-fast, wireless optical connectivity solution for embedded consumer electronics market.

LUMEOVA’s patent-pending wireless modules can increase data speeds by at least 10X compared to latest radio WiFi solutions.

That is the difference in speed between driving a car down the highway at 60 mph and flying a commercial jet at 600 mph!

Today’s wireless information highways are overcrowded and future growth comes through wireless optical runways.

LUMEOVA’s target market segments span the entire range of devices that utilize WiFi such as smart phones, tablets, video streaming dongles, digital cameras, virtual reality gear, wearable devices, drones, routers and TVs.

What is the top pain point/business application you are seeking to address?

Wireless data traffic is exploding due to insatiable consumer appetite for video content on mobile devices. Smart phones and tablets are now equipped with high resolution cameras capable of capturing and displaying 4K video content. Wireless data demand is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 50% in the next 5 years!

Emerging application such as 360° video and virtual reality are only going to accelerate this trend. On the other hand, the wireless industry cannot keep up with the data growth due to lack of good radio spectrum.

Consequently, the new WiFi and 5G cellular technologies will have to improve data speeds incrementally through re-use of current sub-6GHz spectrum and packing more bits in existing bands. That is analogous to packing more passengers in each car along a congested, multi-lane high-way to get more traffic through.

LUMEOVA’s optical wireless solution offers smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices complementary and super-fast lanes that can transport enormous amount of information to and from mobile devices.

What makes it unique?

LUMEOVA’s ultra-fast, wireless optical modules employ patent pending optical technology that enable them to operate in a mobile environment at tens of billion-bits-per-second data speed at low power consumption.