The energy a tower doesn't waste is the coverage you can afford.
TalkingHeads Wireless designs cellular radios around energy. The power a tower doesn't waste is what makes coverage affordable, and what makes unserved places worth serving.
It started with a question nobody asks anymore.
Why does a tower use as much power as it does?
Our founder has spent a career asking engineering's most productive question, why, and this one would not leave him alone. The answer he kept getting was that the architecture is simply what it is. Everyone tunes it; almost nobody goes back to it.
So he went back to it, worked from first principles, and found a gap wide enough to build a company in.
This is the fourth company he has built around radio efficiency. The first three ended the same way: the technology went to the radio makers, and they decided what to do with it. This time we kept it and built the whole radio, for the one market where efficiency is not a line on a comparison sheet but the reason the customer buys.
We know this industry from inside it. We have integrated equipment, sat through procurement, and been paged at three in the morning when a site went dark. That experience is in the product: the architecture is where the ambition lives, and everything around it is deliberately ordinary.
And the name: the unit at the top of a tower is called a remote radio head. Ours have more to say.
Every tower cheaper to run. More towers worth building.
Energy decides how far a network reaches and how much of it is worth running. Remove that constraint and the map changes: towers that never cleared the business case do, and the ones already standing cost less to keep. Not one joule wasted, as our founder puts it.
Around 300 million people live beyond any mobile broadband. In Sub-Saharan Africa, every 10% rise in mobile penetration has been associated with a 1 to 2.5% increase in GDP. Coverage is how people reach banking, health services, markets, and each other. We build radios. Reach is what they are for.
What we believe
- That energy is the constraint worth working on, and that the work belongs in hardware.
- That your caution about new equipment is professionalism, and we design for it.
- That a claim you can test is worth more than a claim you can only admire.
- That better engineering expands what networks, and the people on them, are able to do.
A team that has done this before.
Dr. Joel L. Dawson
Founder & Chief Executive OfficerStanford PhD and former MIT professor. Co-founder and CTO of Eta Devices, acquired by Nokia in 2016, and of Eta Wireless, acquired by Murata in 2021. Author of two engineering books on radio energy fundamentals and feedback theory.
Will Sanchez
Chief Operating OfficerTechnology entrepreneur with more than twenty years founding and operating venture-backed hardware companies. Co-founder, President and CEO of CoolChip Technologies, an MIT spinout. Runs operations and supply chain. BSc, MEng and PhD from MIT.
Shraddha Munver
Chief Growth OfficerTwenty-five years in management consulting across product management, marketing, and customer growth. Former McKinsey consultant. BSc from MIT, MBA from Wharton.
News & press
Milestones, papers, and the occasional thing worth telling you about. We would rather this page be short and true than long and padded.