About AFAR Communications Inc.

At AFAR Communications we design, manufacture and market Wireless Network equipment and solutions, as well as Network Access Gateways for interfacing legacy serial equipment to packet switch networks.  We are located in Santa Barbara, California, a city that has been a center for data communication engineering and digital signal processing since the early 1970's.

AFAR Communications Inc. was founded in April 2003 by an engineering and management team with a long history in the wireless and data networking markets.  Prior to AFAR Communications this group was the core team of UtiliCom  (which later became UC Wireless) who were pioneers, in the early 1990's, in the fields of  Spread Spectrum communications for the ISM bands.  In the late 1990's our founders, Nuno Bandeira and Lars Poulsen, invented and patented the VINE "anypoint-to-multipoint" network topology that allowed deploying low cost wireless networks circumventing Line Of Sight constraints.   In 2001, WiLAN, a Canadian company, acquired UC Wireless and the team became part of a WiLAN subsidiary for the following two years.  When WiLAN consolidated their resources in Calgary, Canada, the team in Santa Barbara formed AFAR Communications.

At AFAR we cater to customers that require dependable and reliable wireless links even in the presence of ever increasing interference.  Our radios occupy less bandwidth, have greater sensitivity, and cover longer ranges than most other spread spectrum radios.  Based on this unique platform we have then adapted its firmware to deal with unique customer requirements.

Many of our customers have equipment built to work with serial data links (synchronous or asynchronous). However, most of the modern wireless data systems are designed to carry packet-oriented (Ethernet) traffic exclusively.  To ease the transition into the newer networks we developed the NetCrossing Gateway product family which provides a serial interface to the legacy serial equipment but carries the data across the modern packet switch networks.