Stadium Wi-Fi has become mission-critical. Fans expect instant sharing, mobile ticketing, in-seat ordering, and real-time highlights. Staff need reliable connectivity for operations, security, POS, and venue apps. And venue operators are under pressure to turn connectivity into measurable business outcomes.
That is why we are excited to announce that GoZone WiFi will be participating in the upcoming Wi-Fi NOW webinar:
Connected stadiums Webinar: Networks driving experience, engagement, & revenue
Wednesday, July 8
7:00 pm CEST / 10:00 am PDT
Register here: Reserve your spot
Our speaker will be Wayne Newton, VP Sales & Business Development at GoZone WiFi, joining a panel of stadium connectivity leaders to discuss what is changing, what is working, and what is next.
Stadiums represent one of the ultimate challenges in Wi-Fi networking. You are serving tens of thousands of users in a high-density environment where demand spikes instantly, usage patterns change by the minute, and the physical environment is complex.
At the same time, expectations have never been higher:
The result is a simple truth: stadium Wi-Fi is no longer just an IT project. It is a business platform.
The webinar session will explore the latest advances in stadium connectivity, including:
As Wi-Fi standards evolve, the conversation is also shifting toward what next-generation capabilities enable, including:
This webinar brings together a strong lineup of industry leaders:
At GoZone WiFi, we work with venues and large public spaces to help them get more from their guest Wi-Fi.
Reliable stadium Wi-Fi is the foundation, but the opportunity is bigger than access. With the right approach, venues can turn guest connectivity into:
In other words, the network becomes a tool for both fan experience and business performance.
If you are involved in stadium connectivity, fan experience, or venue operations, this session is built for you, including:
The event is live and free to attend. Register here to watch:
We hope you can join us on July 8 and be part of the discussion on what is next for stadium Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 7, and the future of connected venues.
Brussels, Belgium – June 24, 2026 – The undersigned organisations representing the European connectivity ecosystem – including fibre operators, ISPs, semiconductors, hardware and software manufacturers, online pharmacies, tourism, and consumer electronics retail – and fully committed to strengthening Europe’s digital infrastructure, welcome the European Commission’s proposal for a Digital Networks Act (DNA).1 However, we note that, in its current form, the proposal does not sufficiently recognise the critical role of Wi-Fi® as a key enabler of European connectivity.
Without adequately prioritising Wi-Fi as a key enabler of the 2030 Digital Decade targets – including gigabit-capable connectivity for all European households, full 5G coverage of populated areas, and ensuring that 90% of SMEs reach at least a basic level of digital intensity2 – achieving these objectives will become significantly more difficult, ultimately undermining Europe’s broader digital ambitions.
Fibre (FTTH), mobile, satellite, and Wi-Fi must be recognised as complementary and interdependent layers of Europe’s connectivity ecosystem. While each technology plays a distinct role in enabling high-performance networks, Wi-Fi serves as the critical final link that ensures gigabit connectivity effectively reaches end users across homes, businesses, public services and industrial environments. Therefore, as full-fibre transition is completed, Wi-Fi performance will become a critical factor in delivering the end-user experience and the full benefits of next-generation broadband connectivity. Indeed, for most Europeans, Wi-Fi is the primary gateway to the internet, delivering Gigabit connectivity from the network termination point to end-user devices where connectivity is consumed. Today, Wi-Fi carries over 90% of indoor internet traffic across homes, hospitals, businesses, public services and industrial environments. It is also a foundational technology that SMEs and industries rely on for edge computing, automation, robotics and AI-driven applications.3 Beyond industry, advanced Wi-Fi connectivity is increasingly essential to Europe’s travel and visitor economy, underpinning digital and AI-driven services across smart destinations, cultural heritage sites and tourism SMEs — making it a key enabler of innovation and competitiveness across the full breadth of the European economy.
Current spectrum policy highlights the need for the DNA framework to effectively recognise the critical role of Wi-Fi connectivity. Insufficient access to spectrum is increasingly constraining Wi-Fi performance and thereby impedes implementation of advanced use cases. Recent studies indicate that growing Wi-Fi traffic congestion is limiting the ability of gigabit connectivity to effectively reach more than 50-60% of indoor environments.4 Europe is falling behind. Leading economies such as the United States, Canada and South Korea have already opened the entire 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi use, accelerating innovation in immersive education, healthcare services, smart manufacturing, and sustainable technology. 5This is not merely a spectrum policy debate, but a strategic policy choice with significant implications for Europe’s technological sovereignty, industrial competitiveness, technological leadership, and long-term innovation capacity.6
In this context, to ensure that the DNA fully reflects the role of Wi-Fi as a strategic component of Europe’s connectivity infrastructure, we urge the co-legislators to address the following elements in the proposal:
Article 17 – Union Radio Spectrum Strategy
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Article 27 – “Use it or share it” principle
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Article 28 – Radio Spectrum Database
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The DNA represents a unique opportunity to establish a forward-looking and technologically balanced policy framework that will effectively guide Europe towards the Digital Decade objectives. Such a framework should accurately reflect the evolving connectivity landscape and ensure that integral components of the connectivity ecosystem, including Wi-Fi, are recognised and prioritised as strategic elements of Europe’s digital infrastructure.
The signatories to this statement represent a broad cross-section of hundreds of European and global connectivity players, including internet service providers, fibre network providers and operators, hardware and software manufacturers, semiconductor manufacturers, consumer electronics retail, online pharmacies, tourism innovation, and global industry associations focused on spectrum-sharing, advancing Wi-Fi and wireless broadband connectivity.
How the convergence of AI maturity, rising network complexity, and a widening talent gap is reshaping enterprise IT and what RUCKUS’s Agentic Operations means for the teams managing it.
For decades, network operations have followed a familiar pattern: engineers monitor dashboards, triage alerts, diagnose root causes, and apply fixes, often under pressure, and often at 2 a.m. Each generation of tooling automated part of that loop, but the operating model itself remained largely human-driven.
That model is straining under the weight of three converging pressures:
Network complexity is outpacing human capacity. Modern enterprise environments span wireless, wired, and multiple services simultaneously. The number of variables a human can effectively process during a live incident is finite; the networks generating those variables are not.
The talent gap is widening. Experienced engineers are retiring faster than new experts can be developed. Hard-won operational knowledge, the kind that lets a senior engineer diagnose a client issue in minutes, walks out the door with them and doesn’t come back easily.
AI models are finally capable enough to help. For years, “AI in networking” mostly meant dashboards with smarter labels. That has changed. With stronger language reasoning and domain-specific tuning, AI systems can now interpret network conditions, identify failure patterns, and support, or in some cases execute, operational decisions in ways that weren’t practical before.
These three forces aren’t arriving independently. They’re arriving together, and they’re arriving now.
The journey toward autonomous networking hasn’t been a single leap, it’s been a deliberate progression through four distinct operational stages:
Stage 1: Observability: The foundation. Network-wide telemetry, performance metrics, health dashboards, and historical trend analysis across deployment types. Without this raw signal, nothing above it works. Teams went from flying blind to having visibility.
Stage 2: AIOps Insights: Machine learning models identify user experience degradation, correlate events across the network, and surface actionable incidents before they escalate. This is where the industry moved from reactive operations, fixing what broke, to proactive operations: catching what’s about to break.
Stage 3: Automated Remediation: Intent-based AI translates high-level operational goals into specific network actions. Automated remediation workflows close the loop from detection to resolution without requiring manual intervention for every event.
Stage 4: Agentic Operations: The frontier. AI agents with natural-language understanding, expert-level reasoning, and autonomous decision-making, operating within a governed framework, explaining their actions, and increasingly handling what used to require a skilled engineer on-call.
Each stage amplifies the one beneath it. Agentic AI without a foundation of observability, insight, and remediation is just a chatbot. The full stack is what makes agents operationally meaningful.
The term “agentic AI” is becoming overused. It’s worth being precise about what it means for network operations, and what it doesn’t.
An agentic system doesn’t just surface information or suggest actions. It can reason about a problem, take corrective action, and explain its decisions in plain language. The distinction matters: moving from “here’s an alert” to “here’s what I diagnosed, here’s what I did about it, and here’s why” is a fundamentally different operational experience.
There are two meaningful forms this takes in a network context:
Interactive agents respond to natural-language questions from operators. Instead of navigating multiple screens or running command-line workflows, an engineer asks, “Why is client ABC experiencing slow connections?” The agent investigates across the stack and returns an explanation with recommended next steps. The interface is conversational; the reasoning is expert-level.
Autonomous agents are system-initiated, they monitor continuously, predict conditions, and respond to network events within policy guardrails without waiting for a human to intervene. They handle auto-remediation, security response, and compliance workflows, then log what they did and why.
The common thread is that both types operate in natural language, both are designed to reflect the reasoning patterns of experienced network engineers, and both aim to make advanced operations accessible, even to teams without deep networking expertise.
RUCKUS’s answer to this shift is Agentic Operations, a new class of AI-powered agents now rolling out as part of the RUCKUS One platform. What makes the approach credible is that it isn’t built on a single product launch. It sits at the top of a carefully constructed AI stack, with each layer already deployed in production across thousands of customer environments.
The first three layers, observability, AIOps incident detection, and intent-based automated remediation, are live. They have already reduced mean time to resolution for incidents and eliminated hundreds of manual hours typically required for network fine-tuning. Agentic Operations builds on that proven foundation, introducing advanced autonomous reasoning as the next layer rather than a replacement for what’s already working.
The platform spans both wireless access points and wired ICX switching infrastructure through a unified management experience. That matters because real-world network issues rarely respect domain boundaries, a wireless client problem often traces back to a wired switch misconfiguration, and an agent that can only see one side of that equation will miss the root cause.
For interactive agents, the operational engine is DSE, the Digital Systems Engineer, an AI-powered assistant embedded in RUCKUS One. RUCKUS positions DSE not as a single generalist model, but as an orchestrator coordinating specialized agents with clearly defined scopes and domain-specific competence.
When an operator asks, “Why is the guest Wi-Fi slow in the lobby?”, the orchestrator decomposes the request, routes subtasks to the right specialist sub-agents, and synthesizes the results into a coherent answer. This architecture reflects a practical lesson from enterprise AI deployment: focused sub-agents with specific skillsets and bounded authority are easier to validate, govern, and improve over time than a single agent trying to do everything at once.
Governance: Autonomy Without Chaos
Giving AI agents the ability to change network configuration is powerful. Without guardrails, it’s also risky. RUCKUS’s governance model rests on four pillars:
The operating model is explicit: autonomous networking with human oversight. AI handles speed and complexity; humans retain responsibility for judgment, policy, and strategy.
RUCKUS Networks is rolling out Agentic Operations as part of the RUCKUS One platform. DSE and related agent capabilities are in active development, with customer-facing availability expanding over time.
Agentic Operations is rolling out in stages, but the directional arc is clear:
Near-term: Interactive agents improve troubleshooting, analytics, and guided remediation, giving IT teams an expert co-pilot for everyday operations.
Mid-term: Autonomous agents take on common remediation workflows, security response patterns, and performance optimization tasks within explicit policy boundaries.
Long-term: Self-optimizing networks increasingly tune themselves around business intent, user behavior, and predictive models, while people stay focused on governance and outcomes.
The destination, networks that increasingly help solve their own problems with humans focused on what requires human judgment, is being built layer by layer. For teams managing growing infrastructure with flat or shrinking headcount, that shift isn’t just a capability upgrade. It’s a different way of working.
120 times in a 100-minute presentation. Yes, that’s the count for the number of times speakers mentioned Artificial Intelligence (AI) at a recent tech conference! [1] It’s a reflection on how AI is on everyone’s mind, with enterprises large and small, eager to understand and explore how to use it in their operations.
Concepts such as agentic AI, autonomous systems, predictive intelligence, and frictionless customer experiences are dominating conversations in boardrooms and leadership agendas across industries.
AI is now a business priority, and the hunger to adopt it, is peaking with the eagerness to adopt AI stemming from the conviction of its potential to dramatically boost enterprise growth, performance, and revenue.
Yet, in practice, how many of these businesses have applied AI? Do real-life cases exist? How easy or difficult is it to put these into action?
At Aprecomm, we have asked ourselves the same question. Over the last few years we’ve been actively exploring AI, embedding it into our processes, and into our algorithms to meet real world needs and deliver tangible results.
This persistence has paid off. In February this year, at The Fast Mode Awards 2026, one of the telecom industry’s latest and most competitive recognition programs, Aprecomm and broadband service provider, Fibernet, were recognized with the AI & GenAI Pioneer | Telco – Impact award – an award that validated our efforts in delivering measurable impact through the application of AI technologies.
ACT Fibernet (ACT) is a valued and key Aprecomm customer, and one of India’s largest fixed-line broadband providers. ACT faced a deceptively simple challenge on the surface: customer churn was holding back potential growth and undermining planning certainty. The reason was customer impatience with the WiFi quality at home.
It wasn’t just a speed problem. It was the channel interference from neighboring networks, lag from device congestion, and bandwidth hogging by background applications that was quietly degrading the experience of the subscriber. And that gap between “the internet is working” and “the internet feels broken” is where trust was eroding and leading to churn.
The traditional “reactive” response of waiting for a complaint, dispatching a technician, and resolving the issue was no longer satisfying the customer. Moreover, it was also expensive, slow, and by the time it was resolved, the customer had already decided that they were unhappy.
ACT Fibernet needed something fundamentally different. They needed an AI that could see the problem before the customer did.
Aprecomm’s platform is built around a core insight: Quality of Experience (QoE) is not the same as Quality of Service. A network can be technically healthy while still delivering a poor experience. What matters is what the subscriber actually experiences. Like the video call that stutters, the game that lags, and the stream that buffers.
To close this gap, Aprecomm put into action, an AI-powered solution across ACT Fibernet’s home subscriber base.
The solution was Aprecomm-developed agentic AI solution, ACT SmartWi-Fi®. This platform works to optimize every device and application to enable a superior WiFi experience delivering among several other benefits, improved speed, reduced latency, and enhanced reliability.
Here is how the Aprecomm’s AI works in actual practice:
Continuous, real-time monitoring. The AI platform monitors WiFi performance at the application level. It monitors not just whether the connection is alive, but how each application is performing across every connected device. This generates a continuous stream of data that forms the basis for all downstream decisions.
Intelligent channel optimization. WiFi channels are a shared, contested resource. The AI continuously analyses channel utilization across the environment and automatically shifts devices and access points to less congested channels. This happens invisibly without subscriber involvement or a wait for a problem to be reported.
Traffic management by application priority. Not all traffic is equal. A video call has different latency requirements than a file download. Aprecomm’s QoE engine classifies traffic by application type and manages bandwidth allocation, accordingly, ensuring that high-priority, real-time applications get what they need, even when the network is under load.
Predictive issue resolution. Rather than waiting for a threshold breach or a support call, the platform identifies patterns that precede degradation and acts proactively. A device that is consistently underperforming, a channel that is trending toward saturation, a router exhibiting early signs of stress — the AI flags and responds to these signals before they become visible to the subscriber.
Unified visibility for support teams. ACT Fibernet’s support teams gained access to a real-time dashboard showing network health across the entire subscriber base. When a call comes in, agents have full context: device history, recent channel changes, application performance data. First-call resolution improves because the agent is no longer diagnosing blind.
Results started showing at the six-month mark post the deployment across ACT Fibernet’s home subscriber base.
Quality of Experience (QoE) scores rose significantly. As the AI optimized channels, managed traffic, and resolved issues proactively, subscribers began experiencing the kind of consistent, reliable connectivity that broadband providers promise but rarely deliver at scale. A 3X times improvement in speed was recorded. Latency dropped by 15%. Device QoE scores improved by an average of 20% over the 1.35m homes where deployment was complete.
Support call volumes fell. With the AI catching and resolving issues before subscribers noticed them, the volume of inbound support calls dropped by 25%.
As the experience improved and complaints decreased, subscriber retention improved. The customers who had been leaving because of unpredictable WiFi quality had fewer reasons to leave.
The ACT Fibernet deployment illustrates something that is easy to miss in the broader AI conversation: genuine AI maturity lies in its appropriate and specific use in the application.
Aprecomm deployed a system with a precise understanding of how WiFi degrades, how application performance maps to subscriber experience, and how proactive intervention translates into business outcomes. The AI use is interesting because the outcome is measurable and commercially useful.
For ISPs evaluating AI investments, this distinction matters enormously. Instead of focusing on whether a platform uses AI, it is more important to ask how AI is used and if it is successfully closing the gap between what the network provides and the experience subscribers expect.
For ACT Fibernet, over six months of deployment, the answer was yes. Ravi Karthik, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer of ACT Fibernet, stated “We are thrilled to see the transformative impact of ACT SmartWi-Fi® on our customers’ digital lives. Our initial launch data validates our commitment to delivering our promise—ensuring a significantly superior online experience for our customers. Whether streaming on a Smart TV, working on a laptop, or browsing on a mobile device, ACT is redefining what high-performing internet looks like in Indian homes.”
Aprecomm manages over 7 million home and business locations and partners with more than 50 service providers worldwide. The company won both the Analytics & Intelligence Champion and the AI & GenAI Pioneer awards at The Fast Mode Awards 2026.
[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/sundar-pichai-responds-to-viral-ai-ai-ai-meme-elon-musk-tempted-to-join-in-the-fun/articleshow/110244042.cms
Adds Ruggedized SBC Engineering for Defense, Aerospace and Industrial customers to Ezurio’s growing portfolio
Ezurio, a leader in wireless connectivity and embedded compute solutions, today announced the acquisition of Gateworks Corporation, a California-based designer and manufacturer of industrial single board computers (SBCs) engineered for rugged, remote, and regulated environments.
Headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California, Gateworks holds AS9100D and ISO 9001 certifications, operates a U.S.-based SMT manufacturing facility, and brings an established customer base across defense, aerospace, railway, smart energy, and industrial automation. Gateworks’ SBCs are powered by NXP processors, including the latest i.MX 95-based Catalina family, with options for AI acceleration, Wi-Fi HaLow, precision GPS, and satellite connectivity.
“We have long served high-criticality markets such as healthcare infrastructure, with defense platforms and avionics systems representing new areas for growth”, said Mark Pugerude, CEO of Ezurio. “These are markets where reputation matters as much as performance, and where customers need a partner who can commit to the full lifecycle of a program. Gateworks gives us additional engineering depth and credentials to compete in those environments. For customers in defense, aerospace, and healthcare who require a long lifecycle, ‘Made in America’ solution, that partner is Ezurio.”
The Gateworks acquisition reflects Ezurio’s ongoing strategy to grow through targeted acquisitions that expand its embedded compute portfolio and open new high-value markets. Ezurio has built a strong foundation as a U.S.-based designer and manufacturer of standard SMARC and OSM system-on-modules and custom SBC solutions on NXP, TI, and MediaTek platforms. Gateworks extends upon this foundation with a distinct, complementary capability: AS9100D-certified SBC engineering for the most demanding environments on earth, built in partnership with customers to meet their unique specifications.
“We built Gateworks on a simple belief that American engineering, held to the highest standards of quality and long-term commitment produces better outcomes for customers in the markets that matter most,” said Gordon Edmonds, President, Gateworks Corporation. “That philosophy is exactly what drew us to Ezurio. Together, we can offer customers a depth and breadth of domestic embedded compute capabilities that neither of us could deliver alone.”
Ezurio’s certified RF module portfolio, spanning Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE and multi-protocol connectivity, is now directly available to Gateworks’ customers as a fully supported connectivity solution. As “Madein-America” requirements and supply chain resilience become decisive factors in program awards, Ezurio stands uniquely positioned as a domestic partner where origin, regulatory compliance, and long-term support matter as much as technical performanc
Whether you’re hailing a ride on a busy city street, navigating a drone over a field or relying on your car to get you safely home, one thing underpins it all: knowing exactly where you are. Location technology has quietly become one of the most essential capabilities in modern connected devices — and it’s evolving faster than most people realize.
Qualcomm Technologies has long been a leading provider of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) solutions, and today we’re pushing the boundaries further than ever before. To us, GNSS is more than a standalone feature. It’s a system-level capability that’s designed alongside connectivity, compute and power management to enable precise, reliable location across billions of devices. From meter-level accuracy on your smartphone to centimeter-level precision for drones and autonomous vehicles — all with significantly reduced power consumption — the latest innovations from Qualcomm Technologies are setting a new standard for what location technology can do.
You’ve almost certainly heard of GPS, or Global Positioning System. It’s the satellite navigation system launched commercially by the United States in the early 1990s and for many years it was synonymous with the idea of positioning. But the satellite navigation landscape has grown considerably since then.
Today, other countries and regions have launched their own global or regional satellite constellations. Europe operates Galileo, Russia operates GLONASS, and China operates BeiDou. India has its NavIC system, and Japan operates QZSS. Taken together, all these systems fall under a common umbrella term: GNSS, which stands for Global Navigation Satellite System.
Why does having multiple satellite systems matter? Because when a device can receive signals from more than one constellation simultaneously, positioning becomes faster, more accurate and more reliable. Think of it like triangulating your location with more reference points — the more signals your device can hear, the more confident it can be about exactly where you are. This multi-constellation approach is especially critical in dense cities, remote regions or other real-world environments where reliability matters as much as raw accuracy.
GNSS didn’t start out as a consumer technology. In its early days, it was the domain of researchers, surveyors and engineers — people who needed to monitor shifts in the earth’s crust, plan the construction of roads and bridges, or manage large-scale precision agriculture. That changed in the early 2000s, when GNSS technology began making its way into mobile phones. Emergency services mandates in multiple countries required phones to be able to report their location, and that opened the floodgates. Suddenly, location awareness wasn’t just for experts — it was for everyone. App developers quickly embraced it, and today there are thousands of location-capable apps available across every major platform.
GNSS is now woven into the fabric of daily life, powering experiences across a remarkable range of devices.
On your smartphone, GNSS helps you discover what’s nearby, navigate from one place to another, order a ride through your favorite app or make sure your food delivery lands at your door rather than your neighbor’s.
In your car, GNSS has become a cornerstone of telematics and infotainment systems — and increasingly, it plays a critical role in the push toward autonomous driving.
For professional and industrial users, GNSS powers everything from precision agriculture — where knowing the exact position of a tractor or planter can dramatically improve efficiency — to infrastructure monitoring and logistics.
The common thread across all of these applications is a growing demand for location data that is not just present, but precise.
Modern connected devices are marvels of engineering. At any given moment, your smartphone might be running 4G or 5G connectivity, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GNSS — all while simultaneously executing demanding computing tasks. Every one of these technologies draws on your battery, and managing power consumption is a constant engineering challenge.
GNSS is no exception. Location services that run continuously — tracking your route on a long drive, for example — can meaningfully drain a battery over time. That’s why Qualcomm Technologies has made power efficiency a key pillar of its location technology innovation. Our technologies incorporate GNSS as part of a broader power-optimized system that is designed to enable continuous, high-accuracy positioning without compromising battery life.
To put the impact in concrete terms: a 25% reduction in GNSS power consumption can translate to an additional 100 hours of GNSS tracking on a device with a 5,000 mAh battery. That’s not a marginal improvement — it’s the difference between a device that works for you throughout a long day (or a multi-day adventure) and one that leaves you scrambling for a charger.
One of the most exciting recent advances from Qualcomm Technologies is what we call Qualcomm Meter-Level Positioning.
Qualcomm Technologies first introduced Meter-Level Positioning in 2020. The original implementation used a combination of enhanced signal processing on Qualcomm Technologies’ chipsets and a paid external correction service to achieve significantly better accuracy under real-world conditions.
But here’s the key development: Qualcomm Technologies has now made it possible to achieve a similar level of accuracy without relying on a paid correction service. This is a significant shift. It removes a cost burden that previously fell on device manufacturers, network operators or end users, and it makes superior positioning accuracy accessible to a much broader audience.
What does this mean in the real world? Imagine you’re waiting for a ride-share pickup on a busy city street. With conventional GPS, your driver might not know which side of the street you’re on — and you might have to dodge traffic to reach them. With Qualcomm Meter-Level Positioning, the app can pinpoint your location with enough precision to eliminate that ambiguity. For the ride-share company, the same technology can track their entire fleet with greater accuracy, identifying which lane each vehicle is in and dispatching cars more efficiently — reducing both wait times and operational costs.
To understand what Qualcomm Technologies is introducing with its latest Qualcomm X105 modem-RF chipset, it helps to know a little about how GNSS signals work.
Satellites broadcast their signals across different frequency bands. Most modern GNSS devices have long supported two of these: the L1 band (around 1,575 MHz) and the L5 band (around 1,176 MHz). Using both — what the industry calls Dual-Frequency GNSS, which Qualcomm Technologies introduced in 2018 — gives devices a meaningful accuracy advantage, especially in challenging environments like dense urban areas where signals can bounce off tall buildings.
In 2022, Qualcomm Technologies introduced Triple-Frequency (L1/L2/L5) support, adding the L2 band (around 1,227–1,246 MHz). Triple-frequency devices, when paired with sophisticated external correction services, can achieve positioning accuracy at the decimeter level — that’s roughly four inches — or even centimeter-level accuracy with a high-quality antenna. Remarkable, but it required subscribing to a paid correction service to unlock the full benefit.
Now, with the Qualcomm X105 modem-RF chipset, Qualcomm Technologies is introducing quadruple-frequency GNSS, adding support for the L6 band (around 1,278 MHz). L6 signals are already being broadcast by two constellations: Galileo (known as Galileo E6) and QZSS. What makes L6 remarkable is that it carries the same kind of high-accuracy correction data that previously required a paid service — but it is available free of charge to any device that can receive it.
In practical terms, this means that the decimeter-level and even centimeter-level accuracy that was once reserved for professional surveying equipment or premium subscription services is now accessible to a much wider range of devices — at no additional cost to the user.
The implications of quad-frequency GNSS reach across industries and device categories.
And at Qualcomm Technologies, we know that delivering this at scale requires tight integration across silicon, software and connectivity.
Qualcomm Technologies has spent decades pioneering in GNSS technology, and the innovations described here represent the next chapter in that story. By delivering breakthrough accuracy improvements without added cost or complexity, these advances reflect a deep commitment to making location technology work better for everyone.
To summarize what’s new:
Looking ahead, there is no doubt that these enhancements in GNSS accuracy and power efficiency open the door to entirely new use cases across devices and device categories. As the world becomes more connected — and as devices become smarter, more autonomous, and more deeply integrated into the fabric of daily life — knowing precisely where you are will only matter more. Location technology will shift from a background utility to a core input. Qualcomm Technologies is committed to making sure the technology is ready when the world needs it by enabling devices to understand not just where they are, but how to act on that information efficiently, securely and at global scale.
GREENSBORO, NC – June 16, 2026 – Qorvo® (Nasdaq:QRVO), a leading global provider of connectivity and power solutions, today announced it has received the Diamond Award from Chervon Group at Chervon’s 2026 Global Supplier Day. The Diamond Award is Chervon’s highest level of supplier recognition, reserved for partners who demonstrate sustained excellence in quality, innovation, delivery and strategic collaboration. The award recognizes Qorvo’s multi-year performance from 2023 through 2026.
Charles Wong, Qorvo vice president of APAC Sales, accepted the award on behalf of Qorvo at the Supplier Day ceremony.
“It was a tremendous honor to accept the Diamond Award on behalf of our team,” said Charles Wong. “This recognition is a credit to our sales, applications and operations teams who work alongside Chervon every day.”
Chervon is a leading global designer and manufacturer of handheld power tools, bench tools and outdoor power equipment, with a portfolio of brands that includes EGO®, FLEX®, DEVON® and SKIL®. The company’s Supplier Day brings together its top global partners to recognize outstanding contributions in support of Chervon’s mission: “Better Tools. Better World.”
Qorvo’s Power Application Controller (PAC™) motor control and battery management solutions (BMS) power Chervon’s industry-leading portfolio. Qorvo power solutions support the platforms which have made Chervon a global leader in cordless power tools and outdoor power equipment.
“We are honored to earn Chervon’s Diamond Award,” said Jeff Strang, general manager of Qorvo Power Management. “This recognition reflects the deep collaboration between our engineering teams, and our shared commitment to delivering best-in-class motor control, BMS and power solutions. We look forward to continuing to support Chervon as they bring next-generation cordless tools and outdoor power equipment to customers around the world.”
“Qorvo has been a trusted technology partner to Chervon, and their continued investment in motor control, BMS and advanced power solutions have been instrumental to our success” said Jianjun Run, GM Chervon Group. “The Diamond Award reflects Qorvo’s outstanding performance across quality, innovation and partnership, and we look forward to continuing to build the next generation of better tools together.”
Qorvo and Chervon have teamed for nearly a decade on motor control and battery management solutions across Chervon’s portfolio. The Diamond Award underscores this long-standing strategic partnership.
About Qorvo
Qorvo (Nasdaq: QRVO) supplies innovative semiconductor solutions that make a better world possible. We combine product and technology leadership, systems-level expertise and global manufacturing scale to quickly solve our customers’ most complex technical challenges. Qorvo serves diverse high-growth segments of large global markets, including automotive, consumer, defense & aerospace, industrial & enterprise, infrastructure and mobile. Visit www.qorvo.com to learn how our diverse and innovative team is helping connect, protect and power our planet.
BELLFLOWER, Calif. — A young woman unwillingly must leave her disabled mother at home to walk to the local library just to use the public internet to pay the household bills. A few blocks away, a family rations its online time, relying entirely on a son’s cellular data plan to check critical medical updates because traditional broadband is too expensive. At the weekly outdoor farmers market, small business owners regularly turn away customers because weak cellular signals prevent them from accepting credit cards.
These are the everyday realities in Bellflower; a suburb of 75,000 people located just 25 minutes outside of Los Angeles. Despite its proximity to America’s second-largest city, the community has long suffered from persistent cellular blind spots and high telecom costs that have left vulnerable residents behind.
Now, a new municipal network called Bellflower Connect is aiming to bridge this digital divide. By using a private wireless network of solar-powered micro-servers with Intel® Xeon® processors inside, and AI-driven cybersecurity at the edge, the public-private partnership offers an affordable, low-power blueprint for community broadband that organizers plan to scale to 50 additional U.S. cities under 150,000 people over the next few years.
Cutting the Red Tape
To get the network off the ground, the city of Bellflower waived standard permit charges, allowed reception towers to be built on public buildings, and bypassed lengthy request-for-proposal processes. This allowed project partner Tradewinds Networks to enter into a long-term revenue-sharing contract with the city. The funding was split through a public-private agreement, using a $1 million municipal transportation grant alongside $2 million put up by Tradewinds.
The program also includes a workforce development element, training local students to become certified wireless broadband technicians. Having won the 2025 Mobile Breakthrough Award for Social Impact, Tradewinds Networks aligned the Bellflower Connect project to meet sustainable goals, taking into consideration city health, economic development, innovation, and sustainability.
“This model allows us to aggregate services and delivery while making the network self-sustaining,” said Keith Alexis, chief technology officer and founder of Tradewinds Networks. “We then share revenues back with the community, which enables us to keep up a sustainable ecosystem that drives loyalty and usership. Additionally, our AI-based GuardTower solution runs on Xeon to keep the system secure.”
Bringing Power to the Edge
The secret to keeping user costs so low lies in how the data is handled. Traditional wireless networks rely on sending data back and forth to distant, massive cloud data centers packed with expensive, power-hungry graphics processors. That data journey requires heavy infrastructure and immense electricity, costs that big telecom companies pass on to consumers.
Bellflower Connect skips the cloud entirely. Instead, the network uses a fleet of 80 slim solar towers and repeaters placed around town. Each tower backhauls to central locations that feature compact Dell PowerEdge XR8000 series servers running a 4th Generation Intel Xeon processor. This allows data to be processed right there in the city, and in some cases, on the street corner, a concept known as edge computing.
Because Xeon processors are highly scalable and versatile, they “snap” into these lightweight towers easily, operating at a fraction of the cost, power, and space required by a standard cloud setup.
“By having off-the-shelf Intel Xeon system-on- chip processors directly in the towers, street corner or city facilities versus sending information through the cloud, the system is scalable, modular, and information is processed faster, at a lower cost, and using less power,”
–Vijay Kesavan, a principal engineer for Intel’s Network and Edge Group.
This local computing footprint also creates a digital foundation for future municipal upgrades. According to Kesavan, cities can easily snap new services right into the existing Xeon infrastructure, such as smart street lighting, air quality or traffic sensors, and water utility leak detection.
High Tech at Low Cost
While connection to the network is entirely optional, the financial impact on residents who have been using it has been immediate. Qualifying low-income households receive free internet access through a home modem that links wirelessly to the nearest neighborhood tower. Other residents can opt-in for $15 per month, while local businesses can access the network for $39 per month. Alexis notes that’s far below traditional commercial carriers.
As of May 2026, about 60 households are using the service during its early rollout phase. By the time construction finishes in mid-2027, organizers expect 10,000 households connected to the network. Free public Wi-Fi will also blanket local parks, libraries, and the city’s outdoor markets.
Local business owners are already preparing for the transition. Joe Ung, owner of Cassidy’s Corner Café, is opening a new location in Bellflower that will use the network for his operations and customer Wi-Fi.
“Having easy, affordable, accessible internet is a win-win for everyone,” Ung told KTLA-TV in an interview about the new network in May. “A lot of times people don’t see the everyday expenses of running a small business. Anywhere you can save, it’s a huge benefit.”
Scaling the Blueprint
The expansion beyond California is already underway. Wrightsville, Arkansas, is scheduled to begin Phase 1 of its network installation this summer, with eight additional U.S. cities currently navigating the design review and approval pipeline.
Though the yearlong rollout has faced logistical hurdles, project leaders say the community response validates the effort.
“We’ve had many difficulties assembling the model for this network, from rising costs to delayed fiber delivery,” Alexis said. “But residents have testified about the value they’ve gotten from it in city hall meetings. When installers meet residents who tell them how this is changing their lives, it makes it worth finding solutions to this complex problem.”
The industrial landscape is evolving at an incredible pace. As IT and OT environments continue to converge, the traditional boundaries of network security are shifting, creating both new challenges and significant professional opportunities.
It was a privilege to connect with so many of you at Cisco Live this year to discuss the critical workforce and skills gap in OT security. Whether we spoke during my session or connected on the show floor, the energy around securing our critical infrastructure was palpable.
In our session, Securing Tomorrow’s Factories: Developing Essential IIoT Job Skills for Organizational Resilience, we dove deep into the unique security and operational challenges of industrial IoT (IIoT). For those who attended, we explored:
If you missed the session or want to revisit the material, the best way to continue your journey is by mastering the fundamentals. I recommend these 10 modules on Cisco U. as your essential foundation for understanding OT security:
Visibility & foundations
Segmentation & architecture
Compliance & protection
The factories of tomorrow are being built today, and they require secure, resilient networks. The learning doesn’t stop when the event ends. I encourage you to log in to Cisco U., explore these free modules, and continue building the skills necessary to bridge the IT/OT divide.
Thank you to everyone who joined me at Cisco Live. I look forward to seeing how you apply these skills to secure the future of our critical infrastructure.
Too many times we’ve seen or heard a situation where a child falls asleep in the back seat. The driver steps away. Fifteen minutes later, the cabin temperature starts climbing. So, what if somewhere inside the dashboard, the same UWB chip that unlocked the car door when the driver approaches can do something entirely different. Like reading the faint reflections of its own radio pulses bouncing off the child’s chest, detecting the tiny rise and fall of breathing, and triggering an alert before heat becomes danger.
That capability will soon be available in modern production vehicles. The existing Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio already inside the dashboard is learning a valuable second skill.
UWB has earned its place as the most accurate indoor positioning radio available, delivering centimeter-level distance measurements using time-of-flight (ToF): the time it takes a pulse to travel from one device to another and back. Our decision framework for indoor positioning radios covered the firmware realities of choosing between UWB, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Wi-Fi. That comparison assumed UWB was a ranging radio.
This article, which talks about the next-generation standard, IEEE 802.15.4ab, widens the assumption. With standardized radar sensing, a UWB anchor in a hospital hallway can detect whether an elderly patient has fallen, without a camera in the room. With 30x extended range, fewer anchors cover the same warehouse floor, cutting deployment costs and calibration overhead. Ranging is still there. Radar sensing, extended range, and 18x higher data rates now sit alongside it. For firmware teams, the radio’s job description just expanded, and the software has to keep up.
UWB ranging is a conversation between two devices. A tag sends a pulse, an anchor replies, and the system measures the round-trip time to calculate distance. Both sides participate.
UWB radar is an echo. One device sends pulses into a room and listens to what bounces back. No second device needed. The reflections carry information: where objects are, whether something is moving, and how far away it sits. What the device captures is called a channel impulse response, or CIR. Think of it as clapping once in an unfamiliar room. Every surface sends back an echo at a slightly different time and volume. A CIR is the full recording of all those echoes at once, preserving the timing and strength of each reflection path.
The physics underneath is the same as ranging: short pulses across a 500 MHz bandwidth. The difference is entirely in what the firmware does with the signal. Ranging firmware reads timestamps and computes distance. Radar firmware reads the CIR and runs detection algorithms: is something present? Is it moving? Is it breathing?
Two parameters control the trade-off. First, more samples per radar sweep extend the detection range from centimeters to several meters. Second, higher sweep rates improve accuracy but cost more power. Even at several meters of detection range, UWB radar draws under 10 milliwatts. That number keeps battery-powered devices on the table.
The practical result: a UWB anchor installed for digital key access can double as a presence sensor. Same hardware. No extra cost.
The current generation of UWB silicon, including Qorvo’s DW3xxx series and NXP’s Trimension platform, is built on IEEE 802.15.4z. That standard defined secure ranging and physical-layer (PHY) security: the lowest level of the radio hardware, where pulses are shaped and timed. It gave firmware teams a reliable foundation. Time-of-flight measurement with distance-bounding that prevents relay attacks (where a thief amplifies your car key signal from a distance to trick the lock into opening). Every production UWB ranging product on the market today runs on 802.15.4z.
IEEE 802.15.4ab is the successor, expected to be officially released in the first half of 2026. It is backward compatible with 802.15.4z, building on the existing foundation rather than discarding it. Going forward, three additions will matter for teams building on UWB:
1. Radar sensing becomes part of the standard: Under 802.15.4z, radar-like sensing was possible but vendor-specific. Qorvo published application notes on CIR-based presence detection using existing DW3xxx hardware. NXP shipped the Trimension SR250 with combined ranging and radar support. Each implementation used proprietary firmware interfaces. 802.15.4ab writes radar into the standard itself, defining how Impulse Radio UWB (IR-UWB) transceivers operate in sensing mode.
That means interoperable radar behavior across chipmakers. Not just interoperable ranging. Ceva is pushing this further: their Ceva-Waves UWB IP, the industry’s first 802.15.4ab-compliant design, supports combined ranging-and-radar sensing on a single silicon block. Because Ceva also licenses edge AI processors (NeuPro) and sensor fusion cores (MotionEngine), chipmakers can place the UWB radio and the radar detection algorithms on the same chip, rather than offloading CIR processing to a separate microcontroller.
For firmware engineers, this collapses two separate worlds into one. Today, your ranging code and your radar code (if you use it) talk to different vendor libraries with different data structures and different timing rules. A standardized radar mode means chipmakers will converge on common interfaces. Your architecture needs to anticipate a unified API (Application Programming Interface, the set of commands your code uses to control the chip) rather than two bolted-together SDKs (Software Development Kits).
2. Secure ranging pushes from pocket distance to building scale: Current 802.15.4z secure ranging works reliably at close proximity: digital keys, item finders, short-range access control. 802.15.4ab introduces multi-millisecond (MMS) ranging techniques. Instead of a single fast pulse exchange, MMS accumulates multiple measurements over a longer window, trading speed for signal gain. The result is more range at the same transmit power, and the early numbers suggest the gain is substantial.
How much more range are we talking about? Ceva’s 802.15.4ab-compliant UWB IP, announced on March 10, 2026, claims up to 30x range extension over current 802.15.4z. That moves UWB from “is the user next to the door?” to “where in this space are they?” UWB still works best within line-of-sight or through lightweight partitions, so “this space” means a floor, a warehouse zone, or an open facility rather than through concrete walls and steel framing. It pushes UWB into territory held by Wi-Fi Round-Trip Time (RTT) positioning and BLE Angle of Arrival (AoA), but with UWB’s inherent accuracy and security.
For firmware teams, longer-range sessions consume more energy per cycle, making your sleep and wake scheduling more consequential. Your power model has to account for these longer windows.
For decision-makers, the implication is simpler: UWB can now cover warehouse-scale and campus-scale spaces where teams previously had to fall back on BLE or Wi-Fi. Fewer compromises on accuracy, fewer radios to manage.
3. Data rates jump 18x: Current UWB devices communicate at 6.8 Megabits per second (Mbps). 802.15.4ab supports up to roughly 125 Mbps. That opens up use cases that pure ranging applications never needed: low-latency audio transport, richer protocol exchanges, and combined sessions where a single UWB transaction delivers both a position fix and a data payload.
For most Real-Time Location System (RTLS) and access control firmware, 6.8 Mbps has been more than enough. But if your product roadmap includes streaming sensor data alongside ranging, or pushing firmware updates over UWB rather than a separate BLE link, the additional bandwidth changes what your radio can carry.
In practice, you end up with one radio link that handles positioning, data transfer, and firmware updates. That is fewer radios in the design and fewer integration headaches in the field.
The volume signal underneath all of this: Grand View Research projects the global UWB market to grow at a CAGR of 18.9% from 2024 to 2030, reaching $4.37 billion by 2030 from an estimated $1.40 billion base in 2023. The ecosystem is moving. Also, Ceva’s announcement signals that compliant silicon IP is available for licensing now, meaning chipmakers can integrate it into next-generation Systems on Chip (SoCs: single chips combining processor, radio, and memory). Production parts built on 802.15.4ab are a design cycle away.
Here is where the standard meets the code your team writes.
a) Dual-mode scheduling: If your transceiver supports both ranging and radar, your Real-Time Operating System (RTOS: the software layer that decides when each task on the chip gets to run) has to manage two types of radio sessions with different timing profiles.
Think of it as air traffic control for a runway shared by two kinds of aircraft. Ranging sessions are the small fast jets: short bursts, tight timing, nanosecond-level precision. Radar sweeps are the heavy cargo planes: longer windows, more data collected, a different processing pipeline on the ground. Interleaving them without collision is a scheduling problem that ranging-only firmware never had to solve.
b) A new signal processing layer: Ranging firmware reads timestamps from the transceiver. Radar firmware reads CIR data: arrays of amplitude and phase samples that need filtering, thresholding, and classification to extract meaning (is someone present, are they moving, are they breathing). These are algorithmic problems that require more flash memory and RAM. If your current firmware barely fits in a DW3xxx’s companion microcontroller (MCU: the small processor running your tag’s software), radar processing will force a hardware reassessment.
c) Power budget complexity: A tag that ranges every 500 milliseconds has a predictable power profile. Add radar sweeps every 2 seconds and the profile shifts. Add adaptive logic that triggers radar only when ranging detects proximity, and the profile becomes state-dependent. Your power model needs to account for these layered modes. Otherwise, battery life estimates built for ranging alone will miss the mark.
d) The abstraction question: This one is about future-proofing. An abstraction layer in firmware works like a standard electrical outlet in a house. You plug in any appliance without rewiring the wall. Without that standard interface, every new device would mean tearing open the drywall. If your firmware talks directly to a 802.15.4z transceiver without a clean hardware abstraction layer between them, swapping in an 802.15.4ab chip later will mean rewriting that boundary. A few days of architecture work today prevents a quarter of rework after your product ships.
Automotive child presence detection: The European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), the body that rates vehicle safety, have started tightening their scoring of vehicles on child presence detection (CPD) systems from 2025 onward. UWB radar detects micro-movements like breathing inside a cabin using the same anchor hardware as the digital key. No extra sensors. This is the first application where UWB radar will ship at volume, because regulation demands it.
Occupancy sensing without cameras: UWB radar detects presence and motion without capturing images. For healthcare facilities (fall detection in elder care), enterprise buildings (meeting room utilization), and smart buildings (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning automation), that privacy advantage changes the deployment conversation entirely.
Sparser infrastructure for indoor positioning: With 30x range improvement, fewer anchors cover the same floor space. Fewer anchors means lower deployment cost and less calibration overhead. Those two factors have been UWB’s most persistent adoption barriers.
If your team is mid-development on 802.15.4z, finish your product. The current silicon is stable and proven. But design your firmware with enough abstraction that the next chip does not demand a rewrite.
However, if you are in early product definition, factor in the widening value proposition. A radio that does ranging today and radar tomorrow carries a different cost-benefit weight than ranging alone.
Now, if your team is designing UWB firmware and wants to stress-test the architecture against what 802.15.4ab will demand, embedUR runs 30-minute architecture reviews. The review maps your requirements to firmware topology, models your power budget, and flags where your abstraction layer needs room to grow. That conversation costs less than the rework it prevents.
Which is cheaper for your team: the abstraction layer now, or the rewrite later?
