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After latest AT&T & T-Cellular information exposures, startup Cape desires to guard shopper privateness
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It’s working an MVNO on UScellular’s IoT community
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It has obtained $61 million in VC funding to this point
Startup Cape has pulled in $61 million in enterprise funding and has its first telephones testing out its shiny new Cellular Digital Community Operator (MVNO) on UScellular’s community for the Web of Issues (IoT).
After AT&T’s latest information breach, which impacted 73 million accounts, some savvy shoppers could also be in search of an operator that doesn’t take (and maintain) a lot private information. Enter Cape.
CEO and co-founder John Doyle informed Fierce on a name that he got here on the drawback of interfacing with a cell phone community from a defensive place, after being a communications specialist within the U.S. Military and dealing for Palantir.
“Simply as a shopper and an individual dwelling my life with a telephone in my pocket, how can I reset the default, which is that I’ve to offer all the things away with a view to connect with a cellular community?” Doyle requested.
This need for one thing past the established order motivated the muse of Cape to create an operation that didn’t want your location and id particulars to get related to the community. “We discovered that we would have liked to start out an MVNO with a view to have the footprint wanted to essentially assault that drawback,” Doyle mentioned. (It is value noting right here others, like Fairly Good Telephone Privateness from Invisiv, are additionally trying to sort out this concern.)
Cape not too long ago got here out of stealth mode and is driving on UScellular’s nationwide IoT community, which began as an LTE-M community in 2020. UScellular additionally has began rolling out 5G non-public networks primarily based on its mid-band 5G community.
“UScellular has constructed an incredible overlapping community, comprised of their very own community and associate networks within the U.S., for IoT and industrial use circumstances,” Doyle mentioned. “They’ll credibly and accurately declare they’ve the best tower density of any community within the U.S.,” the CEO acknowledged.
What USCellular wasn’t doing was utilizing that IoT community for voice providers, which is what Cape is doing. “We mentioned look, we’re constructing a full stack MVNO, so we’re pleased to run our core and our IMS [IP Multimedia Subsystem] over the community and provide voice providers,” Doyle mentioned.
He mentioned mentioned that any fashionable smartphone may use the Cape MVNO.
Cape presently has employees “dogfooding” telephones dwell nationwide on the community – that’s, it’s utilizing its personal employees as guinea pigs for inside beta testing. It intends to launch for shoppers later this 12 months.
Doyle mentioned that he anticipated enterprise and authorities clients to be among the many first customers.