MIRAIT Corporation, a Japanese engineering company, and the U.S.’s Metawave, a connectivity and mobility tech company, announced a partnership last week. MIRAIT has agreed to sell and deploy Metawave’s KLONE™ Passive Reflectors to public and private organizations throughout Japan.
The KLONE reflector is a product developed by Metawave that uses metamaterial (i.e., any material engineered to have a property that is not found in naturally occurring materials) technology to enable passive beamforming. Since December 2019, in collaboration with Metawave, MIRAIT has been conducting propagation tests, channel analysis, trial manufacture, and performance evaluation of KLONE reflectors as passive reflectors in constructing a local 5G wireless area.
The metamaterial/metastructure technology used in the KLONE reflect array has reflective properties that, according to the company: “are not found in nature.” They hope the reflector can create a wireless area that “does not take up space, does not feel oppressive, does not consume any power, does not require permits or licenses, and does not spoil the aesthetics of the area.”
Metawave CEO Maha Achour said, “As 5G continues to proliferate, the millimeter-wave network is the most technically exciting. It provides a connection speed that lends itself to amazing use cases like virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotics for delivery. The industry needs low-cost, low-power, easy-to-install repeaters, and reflectors in order to save on the deployment of new radios.”
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