Manifesto · v1.0 · Filed in lieu of a pitch deck

We're building the radio
the phone companies
forgot to.

§ I — Premise

The category has been frozen for sixteen years.

Cellular has been the most-used radio on Earth for two decades. And yet it's still bundled, locked, and brokered. Every laptop with a cellular SKU costs $200 more and locks you to one carrier. Every hotspot ties your computer to your phone. Every USB modem looks like a 2008 ThinkPad accessory.

The category is stagnant because the people best positioned to fix it — carriers and laptop OEMs — have no incentive to. Carriers want you on their app. Apple wants to charge for the iPad cellular SKU and quietly never ships a Mac equivalent. Relay isn't trying to disrupt either of them. We're just shipping the thing that should already exist.

R1 · Space Black R1 · Concept render
§ II — Principles

Four things
we won't compromise.

01

Hardware should be sovereign.

Your radio shouldn't need to phone home, accept a EULA, or be paired to an account. Relay works fully offline-of-our-cloud. We never see your traffic. There is no "Relay Cloud."

02

The customer is the user. Not the carrier.

We sell to you. The carriers sell us bandwidth. The relationship is yours; switching is one SIM swap. If a carrier asks us to lock the device, the answer is no.

03

Support the hardware. For the life of the device.

Five-year guaranteed firmware updates. Out-of-warranty repairs at cost for as long as we have parts. The thing you bought keeps working — and keeps getting better — long after we stop selling it.

04

Ship something a human can hold.

No betas, no waitlists, no "Founders Edition" digital tier. The first units are real hardware in a real box, machined and assembled and tested by us.

§ III — Who

One workbench.

Relay is an independent hardware project. We're not VC-funded, not a 50-person company, not a side hustle for a larger firm. The product, the website, the emails — all of it comes from the same workbench.

If you reserve a unit, the person packing your box is the same person who designed the antenna. If you email kavin@relay5g.com, you'll get a reply — not a ticket number.

§ IV — Roadmap

What's ahead.

Now
Industrial design + antenna layout
Current
Next
Engineering prototype — first plug-in on real Macs
Up next
Later
FCC / CE / IC certification filings
Planned
Q2–Q3 2027
First batch ships — reservations honored in order
Planned

Help us put the radio
back inside the computer.

Reserve a unit. No payment today.

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