SouthWest startup Xsilon launches in Barcelona

March 3, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: News

A startup from Bath has launched its technology to the world at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona aiming to connect up all the different bits of electronics in the home.

Xsilon’s HANADU “Whole Home, Every Home” technology is aimed at service operators and equipment makers and can handle any communications link whether it is wireless or wired, with low cost and low power. It is initially aiming at smart meter connections in the home as s well as in difficult building deployments, in-home energy management solutions, appliance monitoring and maintenance applications, and telemedicine services.

A lot of wireless links struggle to reach devices that are located inside homes, as external wireless networks struggle to penetrate the shell of the building and internal wireless networks continue to face challenges with the obstacles, clutter and coverage deadspots within a typical home environment.

HANADU plus into the growth of machine-to-machine, or M2M, technology where machines in the home all talk to each other and so is low cost enough to work in your fridge or washing machine as well as with your phone or iPad. The key is that it reaches within the home to every point where M2M connectivity might be needed, and overcomes the deadspots and range problems typically associated with previous inhome deployments. Unlike equivalent wireless offerings, costly but underused repeater points are not needed.

All sorts of different ‘ad hoc’ approaches are supported with auto-discovery routing algorithms where the system looks around for waht avaiable and then connects to it automatically, and the bandwidth scales to support many dozens of connected endpoints within a single home.
HANADU comes with a radically lower power consumption than legacy approaches and state-of-the-art network security keeps householders’ privacy fully secure.

Xsilon’s experienced technology team in the South West has created HANADU using more than two man-centuries of communications technology development and product experience. Other communications technologies deployed in the home were originally designed for other areas, and compromises in performance or connectivity have inevitably been encountered during deployment as an In-Home M2M offering. Rather than accepting such compromises, the Xsilon team designed HANADU using a cleansheet approach with three design goals in mind: superior performance within the home environment; direct relevance to the needs of in-home M2M applications; and, compatibility with all
legacy in-home technologies.

Xsilon has generated its own intellectual property in designing HANADU, and it will be opening the technology up to standardisation activities in the near future. The first products will allow vendors and service providers to evaluate the connectivity advantages of HANADU technology, followed by connectivity modules for integration into equipment.