Areas starved for high-speed broadband may get a new option thanks to a system that’s based on Wi-Fi hardware and could deliver half a gigabit per second to each home.

The technology from Mimosa Networks would send data from an access point on a tower or neighboring building to a small antenna on the customer’s home. That could mean a much cheaper connection than running fiber or copper wires to each residence, an attractive proposition for service providers that want to compete with cable companies and carriers or get people in less developed countries online for the first time.

Wireless ISPs have used Wi-Fi for home broadband for years, but mostly in rural areas, partly because of interference issues in more dense neighborhoods. Mimosa took mass-produced, relatively low-cost chips built for Wi-Fi and modified them with its own protocol, which lets many users share time on a single channel, said Jaime Fink, founder and chief product officer at Mimosa, based in Campbell, California.

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