Transcelestial aims to help telcos roll out 5G rapidly and cost effectively in SEA

Growing up in the steel city of Jamshedpur (east India) in the 2000s, Rohit Jha was frustrated with the poor internet connectivity in his locality. He carried the frustration with him until he went to Singapore for higher studies after completing his schooling in 2007.

On his very first day at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Jha was astonished by the high-speed internet connectivity on the campus and the content and collaboration that came with it.

“It was revolutionary,” Jha said about his experience at NTU. “We wanted to offer such an opportunity and experience to everyone who wishes to push our civilisation faster and further. That was the inspiration to start Transcelestial Technologies.”

Founded in December 2017 by Jha and Dr Mohammad Danesh, Singapore-based Transcelestial is building a space laser network to “deliver a step-change in internet connectivity globally”.

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The startup has developed a device, called Centauri, which provides a wireless distribution network between buildings, traditional cell towers, street-level poles and other physical infrastructure.

With the size of a shoe-box, the device weighs less than 3kg and is capable of delivering fibre-like speeds to customers, claims Jha. It is a rapidly-deployable, low-cost and high-speed solution, which can be used in dense residential areas that require bandwidth upgrades.

Two versions of the device are available — 1 Gbps Full Duplex (4G & Enterprise ready) and 10 Gbps Full Duplex (5G-ready).

“Last-mile connectivity is a big challenge in countries like India where extremely complex land rights issues prevent high-speed fibre deployments and ownership at low cost,” he says.

Education is one sector which has born the brunt of slow internet connectivity. Students and generally those who come in that age group have a huge consumption of content, which puts a lot of pressure on university networks. Most schools and universities don’t see this as a priority. Hence, they don’t invest better internet infrastructure.

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This is where Centauri assumes significance. “Using Centauri Wireless Laser Communication, a high-speed dedicated infrastructure could connect main telecom servers in the city to student campuses. This can happen within a few days at a fraction of the cost that goes into deploying dedicated fibre infrastructure.

The device can also interconnect various buildings, street furniture and hostels for increased local collaboration, local streaming of classes and lectures, as well as opening up doors for 5G, self-driving cars and other testbeds for students to learn from,” he claimed.

The beginning

The Transcelestial team

Jha met his co-founder Mohammad Danesh at Entrepreneur First’s first batch in Singapore. After several brainstorming sessions, the duo set up Transcelestial in December 2017 with a pre-seed round.

“We then raised one of the largest seed rounds (US$1.8 million) of that time in Southeast Asia to build the best team globally to address this technology, develop the first version of the core capability and a product, with which we could go to market for early commercial validation,” he shared.

In Q4 2019, the pair decided it was time to scale up the team to put the product in the hands of many telcos, internet service providers (ISPs) and enterprises worldwide.

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For this, the firm reached out to several VCs and successfully raised a US$9.6 million Series A round, which was led by EDBI and Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Airbus Ventures, Cap Vista, Partech, and Tekton Ventures.

The underlying tech

Centauri is sold along with a network monitoring and management software and is used to transmit extremely high-speed data, matching that of fibre up to a certain level, Jha brags.

“The underlying technology that carries data is a laser light beam. This is the same technology used inside a fibre cable to carry data. Our effort has been to take this technology out of the confines of a fibre cable and make it reliably transmit internet data wirelessly between two Centauri devices (one acting as a transmitter and another receiver). The data transmission follows traditional fibre optics protocols and can support all kinds of traffic as it is a Layer 1 technology,” he said, sharing more details of the product.

The device, when used as part of a telecom network or enterprise network, generates certain network-level information which can reveal the status of the connectivity on a large scale. The software is used to monitor and manage such a network, he detailed.

“We can help telecom companies rapidly set up high-speed cell tower networks (especially for 5G) and for enterprises on their internal networks,” said Jha, who holds an Engineering Degree in Electrical and Electric Engineering.

The price of the device depends on the volume of devices ordered. Usually, a telco deploys 1,000-1,500 cell towers every year in an average-sized country.

“From a price point perspective, it is commercially competitive to existing options for transferring data (fibre, microwave antenna, etc.) which are either slower or more expensive at our current capabilities. So it’s affordable even though it is a super new technology,” he added.

Jha also revealed that the company also has requests coming from individuals to buy the device for personal use.

Currently, Transcelestial has a presence in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea. It plans to go deeper into the remaining Asian markets, as well as target global markets which have similar issues in fibre connectivity and poor last-mile internet distribution.

Centauri and 5G rollout 

As Singapore getting ready to roll out 5G, Transcelestial claims Centauri can help rapidly accelerate the process because it takes less than 10 minutes to set up compared to fibre, which could take a lot of time to plan and coordinate.

“Deploying a 5G network will require a lot of last-mile connections, as it is much shorter radius technology than 4G,” Jha said.

Elaborating further, he said 5G is a much shorter distance (mmWave) technology in a radius of coverage than 4G and requires near Line of Sight from device to tower. If a 4G tower can cover three to five kilometres, a typical 5G tower should cover something from 500 metres to one-kilometre maximum (which will be even lesser in a dense urban building scenario).

“In Singapore, the government has chosen to build a 5G standalone network, which brings in all the benefits of 5G (high-speed, low latency, massive IoT, network slicing) but it also means a huge amount of infrastructure costs (roughly 3-5x increase in cell tower sites due to shortened radius of coverage),” he revealed.

For this, Telcos will have to spend a massive amount of money on new towers (5G radio + tower + rooftop rental) and backbone (usually, fibres in most places since you need a minimum of 10Gbps connectivity to every 5G radio).

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“In Singapore, fibres go to most buildings. But to get a 5G network dense enough, the telcos will need to deploy on-street furniture, shophouses, street lamp posts, etc. All of this will incur massive costs and lots of time (it takes usually ages to get permits in Singapore to dig roads) if fibre is used,” he said.

“Transcelestial’s Centauri helps offset that massive additional cost and time of fibre rollout for SG telcos. 5G can hence be rolled out significantly faster and with much scalable CAPEX to telco and end customers,” Jha claimed.

With 5G becoming the new buzzword around the world, companies like Transcelestial could play a crucial role in making it the rollout faster. But can it make this tech affordable to the masses?

Let’s wait and watch.

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Image Credit: Transcelestial Technologies

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