Nicholas Gianinni Site

About

This is what we do.

We develop tech
for the wireless edge.

Aura Wireless develops  and manufactures technology that transforms how large scale license-free wireless networks are designed, deployed, & maintained.

We exist to facilitate
exponential growth.

Aura created Apogee to address the exponential growth in private networks that operate almost exclusively in the license-free and lightly licensed bands in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico, and most countries in Europe, South America and Asia. 

We make private wireless
scalable for enterprise.

Aura Wireless is the first company to overcome the limitations of low-power wireless devices, enabling the proliferation of large scale cost-effective private wireless networks. The company’s patent-pending Apogee Antenna Array dramatically extends coverage areas and significantly improves signal quality while collapsing infrastructure and recurring on-site support costs. 

This is how we got here.

Mark Gianinni, Co-founder

Mark Gianinni is an innovator with considerable aptitude for identifying a market need and adapting or creating technology to meet it. His first innovation happened in 1989 when he founded Strand Communications which designed the first PC- driven gateway controller in the US which enabled the command and control of multiple media feeds including satellite, microwave and CCTV from a single location over a 56kbps dial network.

After Strand was acquired, he founded Datalinc which built and operated the first shared VSAT hub in the US providing communications services to primarily Fortune 500 companies. Recognizing the need to overcome space delay, in 1994 Datalinc built one of the first private national frame relay networks in the US co-located in AT&T central offices to compliment its VSAT service with terrestrial frame relay services.

Seeing growth in off-premise ATM deployments being somewhat hampered by the need for wired connectivity, Datalinc developed a Part 15 wireless first mile solution that integrated into its frame relay backbone network and was able to help grow the industry by enabling wireless ATM’s to be deployed much more easily and cost effectively.

Mark’s next innovation was to change dial-up credit card authorizations to wireless utilizing the cellular networks at the next start up that he co-founded called Accel Networks. Accel evolved from relatively simple credit card authorizations to full file transfers over cellular which required the development of new antenna technology, for which it was issued a broad method patent in 2013. Accel was acquired in 2015. 

Elaine Healy, Co-founder

Elaine is a corporate finance and operations professional who has done business on both sides of the table as investor and entrepreneur. Elaine spent the first 17 years of her career as a private equity manager based in New York City investing over $200 million in a wide variety of companies. She has served as lead investor, who acts as the principal negotiator on behalf of all investors in a deal and served as a director of several public and private companies in a wide variety of industries.

Her participation at the board level gave her additional insight into operations and corporate strategy that she draws upon as an entrepreneur.

One of those investments was a company co-founded by Mark.  Elaine was a member of that board and out of necessity became acting CFO. Once exiting that investment, Elaine and Mark co-founded Accel Networks in 2002 which was acquired in 2015 and co-founded Aura in 2016.

Apogee Quick Answers

Aura Wireless develops and manufactures technology that transforms how large scale license-free networks are designed, deployed, & maintained.

Apogee is a software-defined, cloud-controlled antenna array offering 4 distinct 90° antennas in a single cylindrical housing.  Apogee transforms enterprise operations by increasing the coverage capacity of a WiFi deployment up to 1000%, while reducing infrastructure costs and mesh links up to 80%. 

Apogee is ideal for any large-scale indoor or outdoor wireless deployment where traditional WiFi is costly and inadequate.  This includes (but is not limited to) distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, big box retail locations, agricultural operations, transportation depots, ports, event venues, and municipal deployments.

No.  Apogee is an array of four 90° antennas that connects to any FCC-certified AP equipped with external RF ports.

An array is a set of connected antennas. Apogee is an array of 4 antennas. The 4 antennas in Apogee’s array can be configured to operate independently or in any combination with each other.

Each coverage area is unique. Conditions like terrain, foliage, man-made structures, and the types of remote devices in use will impact the area over which Apogee will propagate a robust, reliable signal. Depending on the coverage venue, one Apogee WiFi can cover 12 – 40 acres (each antenna within the 4-antenna array can cover 3-10 acres). A good planning number is 20 acres per Apogee (5 acres for each of the 4 antennas inside).

Traditional legacy antennas feature symmetrical gain. The transmit gain and receive gain (from a device back to the AP) of those antennas are identical. Apogee features groundbreaking asymmetrical gain. The Apogee array’s transmit gain is 9 dbi, while the receive gain increases by an incredible 24 dbi  and remains fully compliant with FCC Part 15 power restrictions. 

Apogees are configured in the Cloud using a patent-pending antenna managing platform, Apogee Manager. All aspects of Apogees configuration and optimization happen remotely, without ever having to roll a truck.

Apogee Manager is a proprietary, secure, multi-tenant Cloud hosted by Aura Wireless that can be accessed via a PC, tablet, or smartphone.  All aspects of Apogee’s configuration and optimization happens remotely in Apogee Manager. Use this proprietary platform to configure your Apogee as a panel, sector, or omni-directional unit, and assign ports, polarity bands, and bands to it with ease.

The Apogee array originates all sessions to the Apogee Manager cloud.  As soon as Apogee is powered it initiates a session by building a tunnel to Apogee Manager.  Apogee needs to connect to Apogee Manager only for configuration and optimization.  Apogee does not require connection to Apogee Manager for normal operation.

Yes.  Apogee supports 802.11ax and is also backward compatible to 802.11ac and 802.11n.

No, not without severe performance degradation due to the APs interfering with each other. Aura does not support connecting 2 APs to a single Apogee.

Apogee neither increases nor decreases concurrent sessions. Apogee is designed to operate strictly on the RF layer. Its function is to vastly improve the range and signal-to-noise ratio of any AP connected to it. The number of concurrent sessions is determined by the AP.

Yes, to the extent that the connected APs do. It should be noted here that because Apogee WiFi ensures connections between remote devices and APs up to 1,000 feet, the need for and number of meshes in the wireless LAN will be reduced significantly.

Apogee features 4 external SMA female RF ports. Those 4 external ports connect to up to 4 external AP ports.  For each AP required for a deployment, Aura will build custom LMR240 cables that are terminated with the appropriate connector type and include them in your order. The 4 external Apogee ports can be expanded to connect with up to 8 AP ports (from 1 AP) through Aura Wireless’ proprietary diplexers.

Apogee is a PoE device that supports PoE and PoE+ through a switch or UPS.  PoE injectors are not supported by Apogee due to the wide variation in how PoE injectors supply power to a device.  Customers can attempt to power an Apogee using a PoE injector, but we do not recommend this.

Apogee has no throughput limitations. The throughput of an Apogee array is determined by the connected AP’s throughput, AP channel size and the internet connection.

Yes!  Apogee is very effective in large indoor venues like distribution centers, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities.  Apogee’s asymmetrical gain and hybrid polarization settings significantly improve wireless connectivity between the AP and low-power IoT devices.

No.  The customized predictive RF modeling tool we use is the only one that will reflect the asymmetrical gain achieved with Apogee. Results from any other tool will inaccurately indicate the requirement of more infrastructure than is actually needed to achieve the desired coverage.

The Apogee platform is patent-pending.