About Umber Networks
Umber Networks is building Fi-Wi: a cellular architecture for indoor Wi-Fi. One building-wide concentrator drives many commoditized 802.11 radio heads per space over fiber, so indoor wireless runs on a schedule.
Bob McMahon, Founder
Umber Networks was founded by Bob McMahon, a networking engineer with 35 years of experience building internet infrastructure. Bob created and maintains iperf 2, the industry-standard network performance measurement tool, with over four million downloads worldwide.
His career spans foundational work on FDDI for the International Space Station in 1989, development of the Cisco Catalyst RSM routing module deployed worldwide, and wireless chipset testing using statistical process controls at Broadcom. Fi-Wi represents the culmination of decades solving congestion control, wireless scaling and real-time transport challenges at both the protocol and silicon level.
- Creator & maintainer, iperf 2
- FDDI, International Space Station (1989)
- Cisco Catalyst RSM
- Wireless chipset test, Broadcom
- DPDK Summit, Stockholm 2026
Why 802.11 Needs a Forwarding Plane, and Where DPDK Fits, the DPDK Summit talk, on the DPDK Project channel.
Why the company exists
With more than 23 billion Wi-Fi devices deployed, the protocol has reached a point where adding complexity yields diminishing returns. As density rises, autonomous contention scales super-linearly, effectively the inverse of Metcalfe's Law. The result is a rising noise floor and media access collisions that make unlicensed spectrum unusable for the deterministic performance that next-generation applications need.
The failure of modern Wi-Fi to support low-latency applications is not a failure of bandwidth. It is a failure of control. Fi-Wi puts the control in one place: a single scheduler with a view of every radio in the building.
Measure it first
Umber is a measure-it-first company, founded by the developer and maintainer of iperf 2. The instruments come before the build: iperf 2 with an L4S-capable Android client at the endpoint, and the Umber Sonde capturing what the MAC and PHY are doing at the points where signals land and from where they originate. An operator sees what the wireless segment is actually doing before anyone proposes changing it.
The wider problem
Fi-Wi is Umber's answer, but the underlying challenge belongs to all of us. The 5.5 billion people depending on this infrastructure deserve better than a system designed for convenience and then repurposed for survival. This is solvable engineering. The talent is ready, the manufacturing exists, and the market is waiting.
Get in touch
Accounts for the engineering, advisory, customer and investor material are provisioned individually. Get in touch and say which material you need.