Growth in the hotspot market has largely been driven by wireless and broadband providers embracing Wi-Fi as both a competitive differentiator and an enhancement to core services. New In-Stat (www.in-stat.com) research, Wi-Fi Hotspots: The Mobile Operator's 3G Offload Alternative, forecasts that this trend will continue as usage will increase to nearly 120 billion connects in 2015. The report states that global hotpot venues will increase to over 1 million in 2013 with transportation and convention centers accounting for a small percent of venues by nearly 30% of total connect.

John Fisher has been appointed a member of the Modelithics management team. He has more than 29 years of engineering and management experience and was previously director of engineering and vice president of sales and marketing at the company. Fisher earned his BSEE from the University of Central Florida and MSEE and MBA degrees from the University of South Florida.

dB Control Corp has promoted Fred Ortiz to executive vice president. He was previously the company’s business development manager. Ortiz will continue to manage the production of traveling wave tube amplifiers for a large-scale systems program but will also oversee the development and production of next-generation microwave products throughout the company. Ortiz will oversee business development, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, program management, production engineering and test. He is an active member of the Association of Old Crows (AOC), certified for Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing and a Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award-trained auditor. He earned his B.S. degree in International Business and MBA in Business Administration from Notre Dame de Namur University.

Wireless Telecom Group’s subsidiary Boonton Electronics has been awarded an increase of $1.5 million to its $3 million contract with the Navy for the 4500B RF peak power meter. The instrument will be used in shipboard and shore-based laboratories and by other DOD personnel to calibrate radar test sets, TACAN and IFF test sets, and RF and microwave signal generators.

Mark Elo has joined Giga-tronics as vice president of marketing. He has held various positions at Hewlett-Packard/Agilent Technologies and Keithley Instruments and will be responsible for marketing all Giga-tronics products. Malcolm Levy will retain his responsibilities for managing the company’s worldwide sales and business development activities, will continue as an officer of the company, and will assume the position of executive vice president of sales.

Tahoe RF Semiconductor has introduced an integrated dual-channel (L1 and L2 band GPS RFIC that substantially mitigates interference from LightSquared and 4G L-band LTE signals and other high-level interferer environments. The TRFS15011 integrates two independent receive paths with 12-b ADCs, digitizing the GPS signals. The IC has integrated fractional-N RF synthesizers with VCO's. The receive paths can be configured for high linearity by setting the ADC resolution to 12 b or for low power/low linearity operation by setting the ADC resolution to 3 b. The RFIC configuration is digitally controlled through a bidirectional interface.

Aeroflex Limited and Lancaster University have created the Aeroflex Wireless Broadband Laboratory in the University’s School of Computing and Communications at InfoLab21, the university’s center of excellence for research in information and communication technologies. The laboratory is equipped with test equipment donated by Aeroflex, which has a facility in Stevenage. The lab will allow the university to play a role in the development of next-generation wireless broadband networks and user equipment, such as smartphones, tablet PCs and future mobile devices. Aeroflex has previously provided financial support and work placements for postgraduate students taking the MSc course in wireless communications. Members of Aeroflex staff regularly contribute to the lecture program and the company continues to offer placements to the students on an ongoing basis.

SpiderCloud Wireless, founded by Michael Gallagher (formerly head of Flarion), has developed a technology for solving in-building wireless coverage problems that it claims will reduce the radio access network (RAN) to a self-optimizing package that becomes a seamless extension of the RAN. SmartCloud Cluster technology consists of small cells coupled via a local cluster controller and backed by intelligence over the Internet. It provides targeted capacity at a specific point of broadband use, such as within enterprises, high-rise buildings, college campuses, airports and convention halls. The company demonstrated the technology in a 100,000 sq. ft. office building with a single cluster controller and 18 Ethernet-linked small cells. All mobile voice and data traffic from 600 users was routed via the small cells to the live commercial core network. It handled a daily average of 3,000 calls and 50,000 data sessions. Individual users were able to downlink data from 5 to 10 Mb/s and uplink at 2 Mb/s.

Custom MMIC Design Services has been awarded a 2011 Army Achievement Award in recognition of its work on high-efficiency low-noise MMIC amplifiers for satellite communications applications. The award recognizes the successful completion of the company’s first Phase II SBIR contract and was based on four criteria including originality and innovation of the work, relevance to the mission of the Army, immediate commercialization potential, and overall quality. The company has launched eight products from the research including LNAs with 0.8 dB and 1.1 dB noise figures at 10 and 20 GHz.

According to research from NSR in its “Wireless Backhaul via Satellite” report, wireless backhaul is moving from serving traditional fixed land towers in rural areas of developing markets to mobility platforms such as cruise ships, container vessels, and commercial airlines. The company predicts global satellite backhaul market will grow to $1.9 billion in 2020, three times higher than today’s $64-million revenue. NSR's report predicts growth from less than 30,000 units in-service in 2010 to close to 85,000 by the end of 2020. In 2010, mobility platforms accounted for only 20% of the installed base but will be at least 55% by 2020, with the maritime market the largest portion of the market.