A Visit To Tranzeo Wireless Technologies, Part 1

Part 1: Tour Of The Tranzeo Factory

My wife Tina and I were privileged to visit Tranzeo Wireless Technologies, Inc. in March, 2007. Our visit was at the invitation of Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Tony Kott. Tranzeo is located in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia, Canada, near Vancouver.

Tranzeo is a primary supplier to the Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) industry, with products specifically designed, marketed, and supported for the WISP industry, especially the WISP industry's "agressive" cost points (low prices).

I had been curious about Tranzeo for some time, specifically, how Tranzeo could offer such a high-quality product, at low prices, and ostensibly manufacture and support it with North American cost overhead.

Several things struck me upon beginning the tour of Tranzeo's facilities:

• Their facility was very large, with ample room for expansion
• All equipment was (what appeared to be, from my limited knowledge) state of the art, including high-speed pick-and-place robotic circuit board assembly units, fully automated soldering systems, and very impressive post-manufacture testing systems.
• The overall atmosphere was bright, pleasant, and relaxed; it seemed a very pleasant place to work. There were no "buzzers" indicating break time, start/stop time, etc.
• We arrived just after lunch time, and the employees were just returning to work from the daily company-supplied lunch.

These first impressions answered one immediate question about Tranzeo - unlike so many vendors of low-cost products to the WISP industry, Tranzeo is far, far more than the typical "garage shop assembler", merely assembling commodity parts. Words don't do justice as to how impressive Tranzeo's facility really is, and although we weren't allowed to take our own photographs, Tranzeo later provided us with  authorized photographs; the captions are my descriptions.

The only electronic units that Tranzeo does not make in-house are the radio cards (supplied by vendors such as Atheros) and portions of its 900 MHz radio. All other electronics - the router boards, are designed and manufactured in-house, including firmware. Tranzeo subcontracts its enclosures and antennas. Tranzeo doesn't appear to manufacture the bare circuit boards in-house (I didn't see a printed circuit board process - only circuit board assembly).

Early in our visit we were joined by Vice President of Product Development Damian Wallace, who helped explain the technology that is used to manufacture its products as well as the technology that goes into Tranzeo's products.

One of the first things I wanted to understand was Tranzeo's sudden emergence into the WISP industry several years ago. I was very impressed to learn that Tranzeo was established solely to develop products for the WISP industry. Tranzeo saw a need in the WISP industry for low-cost, high-quality Broadband Wireless Internet Access systems that wasn't being filled by products and companies that designed and sold products mostly for telecommunications carriers and merely "deigned to sell" their products to the WISP industry. Low-priced products for the WISP market were often poorly-designed, almost always poorly supported, and surprisingly often were sold with no regulatory certification.

Tranzeo doesn't seem to have "evolved" from the "garage shop assembler" type of operation, but rather was established and funded to do what we saw them doing during our visit. The only differences from when Tranzeo was founded was that of growth, scale, and excellent acceptance from its targeted market. For example, Tranzeo had previously subcontracted circuit board manufacturing, but grew frustrated over quality, delivery, and ability to rapidly update features and so decided to manufacture their own circuit boards - at a cost of several million dollars. Tranzeo has outgrown its previous facility, grown from a handful of staff to 102 at the time of our visit, and evolved from being privately funded from "friends and family" to being a publicly-owned company (TZT on the Toronto Stock Exchange).

Tranzeo builds Broadband Wireless Internet Access products that comply with the three major "wireless" regulatory agencies - US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and Industry Canada. It supplies products to over 2400 unique customers (mostly Wireless Internet Service Providers) through 18 distributors worldwide (60% of sales), as well as direct-to-end-customer sales (40%). With a staff of 102, Tranzeo builds approximately 500 units per day on a single shift.

We started the tour seeing the circuit board assembly area. As a former electronic technician, I was very impressed with the working conditions - all work areas were very well lit and well-laid out with comfortable benches. All personnel were supplied with ergonomic furniture and tools, and fume hoods removed all traces whatsoever of fumes resulting from chemicals, soldering, etc. I was told that Tranzeo meets the (European?) regulations for lead-free electronics.

As mentioned, Tranzeo uses several impressive robotic pick-and-place automatic circuit board assembly systems. The systems operate so fast that all you can see is a blur. It's probably commonplace for such systems, but I was impressed that the circuit board assembly systems don't merely "blindly place" components, but rather employ artificial vision systems to insure that all the individual components are correct, as well as placed correctly on the board. Only Tranzeo's older systems have through-hole circuit boards; all their newer circuit boards are surface-mount.

An example of Tranzeo's attention to detail is that it manufactures its own "pigtails" - the very small coaxial cable that connects from the radio card to the external antenna connector (or assembly, such as a Radio Frequency [RF] lightning arrestor). Pigtails are maddeningly exacting - the connectors are tiny on the radio cards - tough to mount on a circuit board, but very tough to mount on a coaxial cable the size of a pencil lead. I've heard of WISP vendors that buy their pigtails from high-quality suppliers and go to the extra effort of 100% testing with RF test equipment, but Tranzeo is the first WISP vendor I've heard of that builds their own pigtails from scratch. Tranzeo paid $50,000 for the specialized machine (no hand tools) which precisely strips the coaxial cable for a pigtail - exactly the right lengths of the center conductor, center conductor insulator, outer braid, and outer jacket, with absolutely no nicks. Specially trained personnel assemble the pigtails, which then undergo "200% test" - each pigtail is individually tested, and the the pigtail is also tested as part of the fully-assembled system. Pigtail testing is performed at 2.4 GHz and 4.9 - 6.0 GHz. Wallace explained that cheap OEM pigtails are a key failure point in many products similar to Tranzeo's, and this sort of attention to detail has markedly decreased Tranzeo's in-field failure rate.

Although Tranzeo does not manufacture its radio modules, it "characterizes" them to a surprising degree. Tranzeo uses a "Veriwave HotSpot Simulator" to test 100% of the radio cards it uses in its products. This unit provides a "characterization signature" for every individual radio module, and Tranzeo retains this "signature" data indefinitely for quality control, product development, and product support (they know exactly how much power each radio module can transmit, and what its receive sensitivity was as it left the factory). Tranzeo also "flashes" each radio module to maintain absolute consistency of radio firmware so there is no variation from unit to unit. Tranzeo is an Atheros licensee, so it has "privileged" access to the inner workings of Atheros wireless modules, with the corresponding ability to "tweak" various parameters such as frequency selection.

Tranzeo is best known for its relatively low prices, but its users also appreciate that Tranzeo takes great pains to ensure that their products are reliable. The final stage of production before boxing and shipping is 100% system test where the radio is mounted in a test fixture and programmed to transmit through its entire power range (in an RF-dampening chamber), as well as measuring receive sensitivity through the antenna/pigtail/radio card chain, and of course, all the digital/network functions are tested. Each unit includes a lightning arrestor as standard equipment. One interesting example of Tranzeo's "easy setup" philosophy is that Tranzeo imprints the setup instructions onto the shipping box - "We design all of this very deliberately to NOT cause support phone calls. Installers don't really have excuses like 'we lost the manual'" quipped Wallace. Tranzeo also offers extensive training options with abbreviated training co-located with popular industry conferences as well as training at their factory. Tranzeo's training addresses the "two types" of people entering the WISP business - Entrepreneurs (know just a little, but knows a hot new business when they see it) and Geeks (know the technology, but don't know business issues). Wallace explained that over the years, Tranzeo's experience was that potential customers didn't understand three key things:

1. Network design - how do you scale your systems and networks from 20 users to 200 users and beyond.
2. The necessity of lightning protection, and how to do lighting protection properly.
3. Taking into account Line of Sight / Fresnel Zone issues to engineer a reliable network.

To summarize our visit of the Tranzeo factory, we were very impressed with Tranzeo's use of state-of-the-art electronics manufacturing equipment, a dedicated, motivated, and apparently happy workforce, that there are few or no inefficiencies in Tranzeo's production, resulting in Tranzeo's ability to offer high-quality, reliable products at agressive prices.

In Part 2: Tranzeo's Plans For The Future, I'll detail the wide-ranging discussion we had about Tranzeo's future, including some surprising new directions that Tranzeo intends to explore.

By Steve Stroh

This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh