Broadband wireless equipment specialist Soma Networks has completed a late-stage funding round.
The funding round was led by Temasek Holdings and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners. It also included participation from NeoCarta Ventures and Endeavour Investments. The company raised $15 million financing in late 2004, and this round of $35 million brings the total to $50 million. It is thought that to date, Soma has raised $175 million in funding.
The financing has apparently been earmarked for global expansion as the company continues to work on numerous commercial contracts, network expansions, and the resulting growth in both domestic and international operations.
Founded in 1998, Soma Networks makes equipment used to deliver high-speed internet access (broadband) to homes over wireless networks. The company has development facilities in San Francisco, Ottawa, and Toronto, and operations facilities in Richardson, Texas.
Soma is one of a number of new companies competing to create advanced wireless communications networks that can transmit data and voice calls over the ‘last mile’, the segment between the telephone exchange and individual homes and businesses.
Traditionally, the last mile is the expensive element of the network infrastructure because it requires a physical connection to each individual location. This usually entails the expensive process of digging up roads and pavements, and laying copper or fiber-optic cable to the location.
Companies like Soma hope that the wireless approach based on advanced radio frequency technology will enable telecoms providers to avoid this high cost of digging up the ground and laying high-speed lines to every home and business.
There are a number of hurdles that Soma and its competitors have to overcome. For example, in the US the ‘Baby Bell’ phone companies (the seven regional telephone companies created in 1984 when AT&T was ordered to divest itself of its local telephone service operations) and cable companies currently control the ‘last mile’, and it is not yet clear which standard for wireless technologies will become dominant.
