Glenn Fleishman actually got the scoop. Kudos to Glenn!
Vivato Ceases Operations: Breaking News
Breaking news--Vivato has ceased operations according to a company spokesperson: I just confirmed this minute that early enterprise wireless switch maker Vivato has shut down. Unstrung was reporting earlier today that the buzz on the street was a Dec. 20 halt. A reliable source told me this evening that the shutdown had already occurred, and I was able to confirm it late this evening with the company.
(Via Wi-Fi Networking News.)
It took me a long time to reconcile Vivato's reality against its carefully (and expensively) crafted public image. I'm glad that Glenn provides some detail about the stark differences between the amazing performance of the prototypes versus the mundane performance of the production units. What screwed me up about Vivato was that people whose reputations I trust saw it and were amazed, including a source of mine who I knew well and trusted implicitly and was in a position to objectively evaluate Vivato and verified that the units that he saw worked as advertised.Update 1 - Ed Mitchell writes a bit more about exactly this issue and explains it pretty thoroughly, and from the point of view of one who was associated with Vivato in the early days of the "amazing performance" prototypes.
But in the main, Marlon Schafer had it right when he told me that what Vivato was actually shipping was nothing special technologically.
Former Vivato employee Jim Thompson regularly vented bile on Vivato in his blog. He performed a useful function, exposing the seamiest technological details of Vivato's shipping products, and a candid Vivato rep at a conference confessed that Thompson was causing them some real pain.
Three things that stand out in my mind about Vivato. The first is that Vivato ended up being an absolute triumph of marketing and PR over substance. The marketing/PR folks at Vivato did a masterful job. They smoothed over performance issues of customers, they presented the face of a company that continuously made impressive sales and kept winning customers.
My second profound impression about Vivato was that they were the at the leading edge of a trend to extend Wi-Fi technology into a mission for which it was previously ill-suited. Until Vivato, Wi-Fi was mostly Wireless Local Area Networking, and a relative handful of small, low-profile vendors selling adapted Wi-Fi systems into the Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) market. I think that the high-profile investment in Vivato spawned other approaches to using Wi-Fi as last mile Broadband Wireless, including Wi-Fi mesh, and provided impetus to the then slow pace of getting the sub-11 GHz extensions of 802.16 finished, and eventually finalized into WiMAX.
The third was that Vivato requested, and received some interesting updates to the FCC Part 15.247 rules for license-exempt communications in the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) bands. An FCC staffer told me candidly "Yeah, we were pretty dazzled by Vivato." Vivato's influence at the FCC made it clear that one company can make headway at the FCC if they really know what they're doing.
I thought I had jokingly stated in my blog, but apparently not. Given its history of eclectic acquisitions, Vivato may well be the next acquisition of YDI/Terabeam/Proxim.
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2005 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged.)
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