We appreciate your patience and extend our sincere apologies for the recent lack of updates. During this time, we have been diligently working on hardware design improvements to better serve our valued customers.

Production Delay and End-of-Life (EoL) Parts

Our journey encountered several challenges due to the obsolescence of critical components like the Intel System on a Chip (SoC), base-band SoC, PMIC, Ethernet switch IC, and more. This affected the functionality of our units significantly. As a result, we found it necessary to rework our boards not once but twice, making substantial alterations to our design. These changes were essential to ensure that we can manufacture the units using reliable and readily available parts. The good news is that we have successfully completed this phase, with all our boards now updated and ready for production.

Discontinuation of the Home Node

In our unwavering commitment to delivering quality units to all our backers, we faced the difficult decision of discontinuing the home node. This strategic move allows us to focus our efforts on the tower node (and amplifier), empowering our backers to create their cellular-data networks.

If you have purchased the home node, you have two options:

1. We are pleased to offer a complimentary swap of your home node for a tower node.
2. Alternatively, you may opt to cancel your order. We sincerely apologize for being unable to deliver the home node as originally planned.

To facilitate your choice, please use the form provided here.

Path Forward

With our electronics now in good shape, we are directing our attention toward completing the enclosure and securing a reliable vendor. Our goals are to minimize the cost of producing in small batches and to be able to manufacture locally, in the US. We have gone through one iteration of simplifying our enclosure design, and are producing our first batch with that design for a pilot in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

For your units, we are going through a second enclosure design cycle and will build molds (the first batch is being made using CNC). This will take some additional time, with the molding estimated for 7-10 weeks, and the production another 6-8 weeks. Additionally, we will be getting FCC certification after we have the new enclosure prototypes. The actual certification process could take anywhere from 8 to 10 weeks. We are now targeting a shipment date of December 2024.

We’d like to share some pictures showing our progress as well:

Loading software onto first units

RF testing of front end board for LTE Band 41 in DRC

Redesigned bracket to lower packaging and shipping costs

For those interested, you can access our hardware repository here. Furthermore, we are actively developing the software stack for our decentralized cellular network. While browsing through our code base, we would greatly appreciate it if you could give us a star on GitHub, available here.

Once again, thank you for helping us in bringing this product to life. We eagerly anticipate shipping the product and assisting you in establishing your cellular-data network.