Aereo was a revolutionary online TV streaming service that sought to turn the television industry on its head. And it might have succeeded if the Supreme Court hadn't ruled against its entire business model. Now the former founder and CEO of Aereo is looking to do the same thing with Internet service providers with his new startup, Starry.

Starry burst on the scene this week with a launch event headed by Chaitanya Kanojia, the founder of Aereo, who promised Starry would bring gigabit Internet to the masses -- by delivering it wirelessly.

Starry uses an extremely high-frequency part of the wireless spectrum in the 38GHz ranger, alternately known as "millimeter waves," to broadcast Internet at speeds far faster than the average wired broadband connection, as Wired reported.

The broadcast stations, known as "Starry Beams" skip the infrastructure costs of installing wired networks, like fiber optic, which Kanojia promises will mean customers get gigabit a fraction of the cost of more traditional wired options.

Starry estimates that the average wired network costs $2,500 per home to deploy, while Starry's costs run to about $25 per month. Kanojia hasn't offered details about how much customers will pay, but promised it would be less than the $70 per month Google Fiber charges.

Starry has gotten a lot of attention for promising a cheaper way to bring gigabit Internet speeds to people, cutting out all of the installation, repair, and other frequently infuriating customer service pain points of the traditional ISP industry like cable companies.


And it sounds like Starry could scale across the country faster than any other gigabit build-out, but there are a few caveats to the startup's wireless Internet system.

First of all, customers will have to hang a big antenna outside of a window to receive the millimeter waves. Starry calls these hubs "Starry Points," and despite attempts to make them look futuristic, it's still a big awkward thing customers will have to hang in a window they then will not be able to open.

The reason that customers can't just pick up Starry signal inside their homes leads to another caveat: millimeter waves are capable of delivering blazing fast speeds, but they're much more fickle than cellular signals, and have a much shorter effective range. The glass in windows would cut the signal down, as can any major obstacles or even adverse atmospheric conditions.

Distance adds to signal loss as well. In fact, to use Starry's service, customers will have to be within about a two kilometer range of the Starry Beams, which will be placed on rooftops in Boston when the startup begins its first test launch in March.

High-population density cities are a great place for Starry to start, but the distance limitation means it will still take a lot of Starry Beams deployed to provide reliable coverage. And outside of population centers, Starry starts to look much less viable than those traditional wired networks.

Starry is certainly as ambitious as Aereo, but that means it has a lot to prove. It hasn't launched yet, but Kanojia is beginning by selling an upscale WiFi touchscreen router he calls the "Starry Station" for $350 starting February 5.