Fixed Wireless Equipment

The Super Antenna

We contacted Superpass to find out how this tiny wireless equipment company competes with the major players.

by Gerry Blackwell [March 31, 2008]

Many wireless ISPs already know Superpass Company Inc., the tiny Waterloo, Canada network equipment maker, because they purchase antennas from the firm's website.

Superpass makes antennas for virtually every wireless frequency and network design requirement, offering—according to president and sole owner John Chen—an unbeatable combination of excellent performance, small size and competitive pricing.

The company also develops and manufactures access points and CPE products that integrate its patented antenna designs. And, oddly, it makes MP3 players. But the core competency is antennas.

Since launching in 1996, Superpass has developed over 300 products, an astonishing record given that it's still a very small company with a fluctuating work force of no more than five to ten employees.

Even more amazing, Chen claims the company has been profitable almost from its first year.

Wireless ISPs, he says, make up the largest chunk of his customer base today, which now numbers in excess of 2,000 and ranges from individual users to government departments. Superpass ships to WISPs all over the world—Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa—but its biggest market is the U.S.

The story
The back story on Superpass is less well known. It's a classic of entrepreneurial risk taking and single-minded determination. When I interviewed him recently, Chen was wary at first about telling it, but the story came out in dribs and drabs.

One of his concerns was that publicity might generate a big spike in orders—something most business owners would gleefully welcome. But the company prides itself on being able to fulfill orders very quickly, within a day or two, and Chen appears to have no desire to get big.

"Right now, every day, we're very busy," he says. "We have a lot of orders on the list. We don't want it to explode all of a sudden."

The company can even turn around custom designs for OEMs within a few days and often does. And it completed the basic design of its entire 3.5 GHz WiMAX antenna line—seven products in total—within two days. (It launched the WiMAX line about a year ago, and more recently in November introduced a new line of 700 MHz products.)

This fleet-footedness is partly the result of constraining order volumes to keep them within the company's capacity to produce and ship—which is not difficult to do since, apart from the less-than-stylish website, Superpass does virtually no marketing, Chen says. He adds that, given his cost structure—"we have very low overheads"—he could easily reduce prices by as much as 50 percent. But he fears, again, that it would mean being inundated with orders the company couldn't fill fast enough.

Key to success
The other reason Superpass can move so quickly is that all its products, whatever the frequency and design requirements, are based on the same core technology, for which Chen owns five U.S. patents.

The patents cover a number of innovations that he claims his competitors don't have. For example, one design is for a loop antenna with a unique horizontal as opposed to vertical polarization approach which helps reduce noise and improve performance.

The patented technology allows the company to consistently develop products that are smaller than competitors' and deliver higher gain and wider bandwidth, yet are very competitively priced.

"We're not worried about our competitors. We know our products are better," Chen says. "They don't have the patents we do. They mostly use conventional technology—single dipole, yagi and so on—that has been on the market for half a century."

"As long as people find us they will use our products."

The patents are the key to his success and they are at the heart of Chen's story.

In the mid-1990s, he met two engineering Ph.D students at the University of Waterloo, Canada's equivalent to Stanford or MIT. Both, like Chen, were Chinese immigrants. One was doing work in network design, the other in antenna design. Chen was "the businessman."

They concluded, correctly, that wireless was about to explode, and that there were opportunities to create businesses to exploit it. They settled on antennas because one of the partners had special expertise and because, as Chen says, "how can you do wireless without antennas?"

Go to page two: from startup to today >