Orthogon Systems today announced it has signed an OEM deal with Motorola for bringing its OS-Gemini point-to-point gear into Motorola’s Canopy broadband wireless product line. The two are cementing their newfound relationship with an $8 million investment from Motorola Ventures into the small U.K. vendor.

The deal is Orthogon’s first technology licensing agreement, which sprang from synergies both companies saw in their customers deploying their individual products, said Phil Bolt, CEO of Orthogon. "We were finding that a large number of our customers were using the Orthogon point-to-point gear and the Motorola Canopy system together," Bolt said. "It made imminent sense to integrate our technologies more closely."

Orthogon’s OS-Gemini product line is based on its multi-beam space-time coding technology, which overcomes signal strength and fading problems associated with non-line-of-site (NLOS) systems. Bolt said an individual obstacle such as a tree could cause a signal to drop to 1/100 of its original strength as a standard NLOS system creates multiple signal paths to bypass the obstacle. In addition, those multiple paths are prone to be out-of-phase since they don’t follow a straight line between transceivers, canceling each other out and further compromising a connection. Orthogon’s multi-beam technology, however, sends multiple data streams from multiple transmitters. The individual signals will be subject to the same fading problems but in different periods, far increasing the chances that one or more of the streams will make a connection, Bolt said. At the receiving end, Orthogon’s software evaluates each signal stream and reconstructs and resequences the data image from those combinations of signals, Bolt said.

Motorola will deploy the OS-Gemini gear as backhaul complimenting its Canopy point-to-multipoint access technology. Bolt said the integration of the two products was fairly simple, requiring only the upgrading of the products management software. While Orthogon only builds gear for the 5.8 GHz unlicensed frequencies, the vendor is investigating products for other spectra.

Even though the Motorola deal will open up new sales channels for Orthogon, the vendor has been doing fairly well independently. Since it started marketing its product line last year, it has deployed its OS-Gemini gear in more than 500 networks and has a customer list of about 200. "We will look at possibly taking on another one or two licensing agreements, but it’s not our intention for that to become our primary business model," Bolt said.

In addition to Motorola, Orthogon has received investments from Atlas Venture, Carlyle Group and Lighthouse Capital Partners.