EdgeBeam Wireless

EdgeBeam Wireless is a Boston-based hybrid network operator backed by the four largest broadcast television groups in the United States: Sinclair, Nexstar, Scripps, and Gray. The company is pioneering a new connectivity category that combines the capital efficiency of broadcast infrastructure with the addressability and security of modern cellular networks, purpose-built for the one-to-many data distribution workloads the unicast internet was never designed for.

[Soracom is] money. [They] helped us get to market probably 18 months to two years faster than we would be able to do it without Soracom. And what that means for a young company is irreplaceable.

Conrad Clemson

CEO

EdgeBeam Wireless

The Challenge: An Internet Architected for the Wrong Workload

The public internet was built on a one-to-one model. Every device establishes its own session, negotiates its own handshake, and pulls its own copy of whatever it needs – an architecture well-suited to the static web pages and desktop clients it was designed around.

Workloads have evolved significantly since then. Modern internet traffic is overwhelmingly downstream, and a growing share of it consists of the same content being delivered to vast numbers of endpoints simultaneously: video streams, software updates, map data, and the large language models (LLM) now making their way into connected devices. A connected vehicle manufacturer recently told EdgeBeam that at today’s unicast pricing, keeping a $25,000 car’s software, maps, and models current over its lifetime would approach $20,000 in connectivity costs alone – a non-starter for any OEM outside the luxury tier.

The same pattern shows up wherever one-to-many distribution collides with a unicast network:

The bandwidth is theoretically there. The economics are not.

The Solution: Multicast, Reborn

EdgeBeam’s answer is a single hardware card that drops into existing devices and looks, to the host, like any ordinary internet connection. Inside the card sits two radios. One is a broadcast TV receiver (ATSC 3.0) that pulls down heavy content from towers already covering entire metropolitan areas from a single site. The other is a cellular radio running on Soracom’s IoT platform, which handles device authentication and the return traffic that turns a one-way broadcast signal into reliable, two-way internet transport. From the device’s perspective, nothing unusual is happening; underneath, one transmission is reaching every endpoint in range at once.

Game Changing Economics

That economic inversion is the real story. A five-megabit feed to a million homes consumes five megabits of edge bandwidth instead of five terabits. A fleet-wide software update, a quarterly map refresh, or a new LLM deployment across every vehicle in a city becomes a single transmission rather than a million sessions. Use cases that were economically out of reach on traditional networks – citywide Amber Alert video to every billboard and taxi, RTK-grade GPS corrections to every GPS-enabled device in range, in-cabin AI updates that fit inside a sub-$25K car’s total cost of ownership – suddenly become viable.

Architectural Security Benefits

The architecture delivers a security benefit as well. Because the broadcast path is air-gapped from the public internet all the way back to the content source, EdgeBeam can reach sensitive environments like bank branches and critical infrastructure without expanding their attack surface, and is well-positioned to handle the larger, more frequent key distributions that post-quantum cryptography will require.
Building the cellular half of this architecture – the part that makes every device individually addressable, authenticated, and controllable at scale – is where EdgeBeam’s partnership with Soracom became foundational.

Why Soracom

Architectural Fit, Platform Customizability, and Behavior Befitting a Partner

EdgeBeam evaluated every serious cellular platform on the market before choosing Soracom, and the decision came down to three dimensions beyond any feature checklist.

The first was architectural fit. Both companies are cloud-native and AWS-first by design, and Soracom’s platform was built on that foundation from day one rather than retrofitted onto legacy telco infrastructure. Carrier-grade telecom expertise on standards like TR-369 and high-availability operations filled gaps a pre-revenue startup could not realistically build internally.

The second was platform customizability. EdgeBeam needed a cellular foundation flexible enough to support a network topology that had never existed before, and Soracom’s control plane primitives made that possible without forcing them into the rigid assumptions of a traditional MVNO stack.

The third was how Soracom behaves as a partner. “The Soracom team was really direct in being able to say yes and no to us,” says EdgeBeam CEO Conrad Clemson. “And there were a couple places where we said, ‘This is what we wanna do,’ and they were like, ‘That’s a really good idea. We’re gonna take that and add that to our roadmap.’ That kind of collaboration is exactly the partnership we’re looking for.”

The business impact is direct. Clemson estimates the partnership shortens EdgeBeam’s time-to-market by 18 to 24 months, a margin that for a pre-revenue company translates into preserved investor capital and an earlier path to growth. “Soracom is probably the most important element to get us from here to there,” he says.

What’s Next

EdgeBeam’s roadmap reads like a catalog of applications the current internet cannot afford. Connected vehicle OEMs are already in active conversations about OTA, mapping, and in-cabin LLM distribution. Digital signage networks are evaluating the flat-rate, value-based pricing model that replaces per-gigabyte anxiety with predictable monthly economics, and opens creative territory that per-gig billing has kept locked down. Public safety agencies are exploring multicast alert distribution to every screen and mobile device in a jurisdiction. And the RTK-GPS use case quietly sets up EdgeBeam as a foundational layer for the autonomous mobility and precision-construction markets that will mature over the next decade.

The Soracom partnership is evolving in parallel. The CTO-to-CTO conversation between Kenta Yasukawa and Joe Fabiano continues to surface new joint capabilities, and both teams have signaled that deeper technical collaboration (and a follow-up conversation focused entirely on the engineering side of the stack) is on the near-term agenda. As Conrad puts it: “We challenge each other and we push things forward and we create things that have never existed before.”

The internet spent twenty years forgetting that one-to-many was ever an option. EdgeBeam and Soracom are making sure the next twenty years remember.