FREMONT, CA – July 31, 2018 – The MulteFire Alliance, an independent, diverse and international member-driven consortium that is defining and promoting MulteFire™, today announced that SoftBank Corp. (“SoftBank”) has joined its board of directors, joining Boingo Wireless, CableLabs, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm. SoftBank, a subsidiary of global technology player SoftBank Group Corp., is a tier-one mobile operator in Japan. Yoshioki Chika, senior director of SoftBank’s Solution Strategy Office, will serve as the board director.
“SoftBank has been an active member of the MulteFire Alliance since 2016 and I’m very pleased to announce its addition to the MulteFire Alliance board,” said Mazen Chmaytelli, president, MulteFire Alliance, and senior director of business development, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “As a leading mobile operator, SoftBank complements the expertise of the existing board, and will help lead efforts to bring MulteFire to commercial deployment. Mr. Chika brings valuable experience in leading the efforts to promote unlicensed TD-LTE band in Japan – the 1.9 GHz band – that MulteFire will be able to leverage.”
“We see great opportunities for deploying MulteFire in unlicensed spectrum to meet the growing wireless connectivity demands of our subscribers, and also to use in billions of new IoT devices,” said Mr. Chika. “I look forward to collaborating with the fellow board members on advancing MulteFire as the right wireless connectivity solution for multiple applications in Japan and around the globe.”
The MulteFire Alliance is currently working on its Release 1.1 specification that adds IoT optimizations for NB-IoT and eMTC, as well as adding new support for the unlicensed 1.9 GHz band in Japan, the global 2.4 GHz band, and sub-1 GHz bands. The specification is targeted for completion in October 2018.
To join the MulteFire Alliance, or for more information on MulteFire, visit www.MulteFire.org.
About the MulteFire Alliance
The MulteFire Alliance is an international association dedicated to building a global ecosystem in support of the common interests of members, developers and users in the application of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and next generation mobile cellular technology in configurations that use unlicensed or shared radio spectrum. For more information about MulteFire technology, its benefits how to become a member of the MulteFire Alliance, please visit www.multefire.org.
The MulteFire logo and MulteFire™ are trademarks of the MulteFire Alliance.
