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BEING forced to make cellphone calls from a cramped corner of his kitchen was not exactly Will Franks’s idea of the wireless nirvana we had all been promised. After all, a cellphone is meant to let you call from just about anywhere. But for most of the time the only place he could get a strong enough signal from his local cellphone base station was in that very awkward spot. “I knew there had to be a better way to improve coverage in people’s homes,” says Franks, a telecoms engineer.

So he set about finding one. Franks’s company Ubiquisys, based…

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