Verizon supplier CBNG collapses, cutting 75 jobs after 5G mmWave deal ends

UK millimeter wave vendor CBNG has entered administration, cutting about 75 jobs, after its main customer Verizon dropped the company's product for 5G fixed wireless access over missed production timelines.

Cambridge Broadband Networks Group, based in Cambridge, England, entered administration in early October. It had already ceased trading by that point. Its website is offline. Light Reading confirmed Verizon was the customer whose withdrawal ended the business.

What killed the company?

A single-customer dependency, according to the administrators. "They had one major customer, and when that major customer decided to go elsewhere, that was the end of the company's business," said Stephen Goderski, partner at PKF Littlejohn and joint administrator of CBNG.

Verizon framed the split as a scheduling problem, not a technology problem. "Cambridge offered a technology product that complemented our mmWave solution. As production timelines increasingly fell short, we made the decision to end the relationship with the company, in the best interest of our customers and our business," a Verizon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Former CBNG employees contacted by Light Reading declined to comment, citing the ongoing administration process and commercial confidentiality.

Why one vendor, one band, one customer was fatal

The company was founded in 2000 and specialized in point-to-multipoint wireless systems for backhaul and fixed wireless, using local multipoint distribution service (LMDS) technology in microwave and mmWave bands from 20GHz to 40GHz. It shipped products to more than 100 service providers internationally, with a strong presence in Africa.

After a 2020 restructuring, it rebranded from Cambridge Broadband Networks Limited to CBNG and pivoted from legacy products to 5G standards-based mmWave FWA. That pivot produced the VectaStar NR line, unveiled in January, supporting 39GHz first — specifically for Verizon — with 28GHz in development. In April the company opened a Richardson, Texas office to support US deployment and said VectaStar NR was live with a Tier 1 operator, as Fierce Network reported.

The economics of that specialization were brutal. "CBNG built a custom 39GHz radio for Verizon…that no one else could use," said Earl Lum, founder of EJL Wireless Research. The company also bore R&D costs and FCC certification expenses. "I think that put CBNG under financial duress," he added.

Lum was blunt about the broader market. "There's no other idiot country in the world that was deploying mmWave other than the United States. We were the poster child of dumb, so that everyone else can learn from our failure," he said.

CBNG's collapse follows a familiar telecom pattern. Small vendors invest heavily in product development to win a major operator contract, especially in radio access, and fail when that anchor customer walks away. mmWave adds propagation risk: line-of-sight requirements, rain and fog attenuation, and small coverage cells.

What is Verizon doing with mmWave now?

Verizon's own mmWave strategy appears to be shifting. On this week's earnings call, CEO Dan Schulman discussed a mmWave "technological breakthrough" that would let Verizon deliver 1-Gig FWA services in metro areas. He did not identify the technology. Some analysts speculate he referred to Starry, the multi-dwelling unit specialist Verizon acquired in March to expand its footprint.

A eulogy written in advance

In late September, Mobile Industry Review published an opinion piece by Paul Wright, CBNG's chief revenue officer, defending mmWave. Read after the administration filing, it functions as an obituary for the company's thesis.

Wright argued that the industry narrative declaring mmWave a failure misreads the evidence. The well-documented early problems — line-of-sight requirements, signal blockage, rain and fog attenuation, small coverage areas — reflected flawed planning assumptions rather than broken technology, he asserted.

"The physics were never broken. The industry simply had to learn how to design around them," Wright wrote.

He claimed the case for mmWave is stronger today, pointing to a more mature ecosystem, rising demand for "precision capacity," and better economics and deployment know-how. mmWave will not replace lower spectrum bands, he concluded, but is positioned to become "an increasingly essential component of next-generation network architecture."

For CBNG, that argument now has no vendor left to make it. Whether another radio supplier can build a viable business on Verizon's mmWave FWA ambitions — including whatever "breakthrough" Schulman teased this week — will test the thesis over the coming quarters.