Vanu, the software radio maker has raised Series B funding of $32mn from Tata Capital, NVP and Charles River Ventures.
Vanu, founded by Vanu Bose (son of Amar Bose of Bose corp) will use the funds for expansion in India and US. – source
A software-based radio can tune automatically to any frequency, without having to put different radio transmitters for different technologies, very similar to an operating system of a computer that can run different applications such as word processing or an excel worksheet.
“Companies using software defined radio can save almost 50% in their capital expenditure, and at least 30% more on operational expenditure, which involves maintaining remote sites by regular physical checks,
Vanu is betting big on the Indian market and earlier signed up with GTL to develop solutions for sharing active infrastructure by mobile operators.
SDR is big market. A few other Indian companies also were attempting to put together a solution/prototype for the same a few years back, including Cranes Software. Besides Telcos the need is major with defense forces. Indian defense and BEL were also trying to create their own secure SDR.
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SDR is not a big market!
Frankly all digital radios have had SW components.
Now more and more of that can be done on GPP(general purpose processors)
eg x86 etc. But so what!
Nearly all cellular systems are HW SW combination. SDR is a misnomer.
Erricson, Airvana, Alcatel Lucent all have SW running in their Basestations.
(Infact they have more SW reuse accross product lines than Vanu).
And this implies Vanu’s equipment does not have RF HW or Digital HW.
Highly inaccurate.1
What do i as a customer care if the serving cell is a Hardware based or “SDR based”?
I care on the same metrics that I care about other products like this.
ie Cost, Power Consumption, Size, Reliability, etc….