I'm Charles Higgins. I'm a partner in the valuation practice here at Sentry. Glad to have you all here. I'd like to introduce Ron Glibbery from Peraso. Ron, please.
Oh, thank you.
Take over.
Thank you very much. Good morning. Ron Glibbery with Peraso. Here's my colleague Jim Sullivan, our CFO. I'm the CEO of the company. I will just jump right into this today. Disclaimer. What does Peraso do? We're what's called a fabless semiconductor company. We make computer chips, design computer chips, sell computer chips, but we subcontract the manufacturing to TSMC. This is like the famous NVIDIA model, of course, in terms of our business model. We've been in business for about 15 years, and our focus is on high-speed wireless. You can see that we've kind of focused on about four different markets, really three primary markets. One is called fixed wireless access, so that's high-speed internet. I'm going to talk today a little bit about military and defense, which I think is a great opportunity for us.
We're already starting to see revenue from that. Actually, ironically, for some of you that are in the prior presentation, it was a company called Vuzix, and we actually do VR glasses. That's another opportunity for us. We have about 50 patents, and we conform to standards of IEEE. We're listed on NASDAQ in December 2021. I'm going to give you a quick engineering lesson. Basically, if you look at, I guess, my right, your left, we deal in the very high-frequency part of the spectrum. That confers some advantages to us in the marketplace. The second picture is the one that's actually quite important because basically it's a key to the presentation in terms of what we do is create very focused beams with our technology. This brings us advantages in the marketplace.
Basically, this is really our expertise. It's high frequency, which really the thesis of the business going back 15 years ago was that spectrum was really like lakefront property and it's going to eventually run out of it. We're actually seeing that today. Basically, that's the opportunity that we're capitalizing on. It's the fact that spectrum is becoming rare, and we're opening up new spectrum in the higher frequency spectrum. These are the markets I'm going to talk about today. Fixed wireless access, this is our main market. This is a very, very popular market right now. If you follow 5G at all, it's really been the golden or the sweet spot of 5G. We do this around the world. In our frequency band, which is 60 GHz, we're really the only player right now in terms of from a semiconductor perspective.
Tactical communications, I'm going to talk about that. It's a very, very exciting opportunity for us in terms of new military opportunities. Going back to the beams that I showed you on the first slide, the idea there is that in a battlefield environment, it's what we call stealthy. In fact, it's very difficult, almost impossible for the enemy to detect. We're taking advantage of that capability in the marketplace right now. Transportation and also professional video delivery. VR glasses or even things like in operating rooms, video in operating rooms and so on. In terms of the market size, the technology is called millimeter wave, which is high-frequency wireless. The market's valued about for semiconductors. Of course, keep in mind, we are a semiconductor. It is about $3.4 billion, growing at an annual rate of 20%.
We are the guys that actually focus on the unlicensed part of the marketplace, and we're actually the dominant players in this now. We really, I think this quarter, we're going to probably announce that we've shipped a couple million chips in our lifetime. Nobody's even close to us in terms of competitive situation. This is a good and growing market again because it's opening up new spectrum that hasn't been available historically. Let me start off with what we call fixed wireless access. This is just providing high-speed internet access. This is a market that basically is at some level competing with fiber. You hear a lot about fiber, but what people don't talk about is what we refer to as fixed wireless access.
Basically, really the opportunity here is, and what we do again with these specialized beams that I talked about earlier, we're expanding really into global markets, starting with the U.S. Basically we've got a partnership with a company called WeLink, downtown Los Angeles. We're deploying there. Basically the idea, the reason this technology works in these environments is again because we've got these specialized beam capability that we can deploy in these very dense environments. Really the market for us is the 2.6 billion people in the world that have poor internet access. For example, in South Africa, we've got a very significant deployment in some of the townships there. It's really quite incredible to see that we're actually enabling literally millions of people with what we call high-speed internet access. For them, it is the next generation.
It is just really kind of game-changing for them. Also, for example, in other places in Africa, including places like Kenya. We have really a platform that we call the DUNE platform. This is the dense urban environment. This is a full integrated solution that provides this ability to do very dense deployments really on a global basis. Actually, in America, it is really probably our best opportunity because basically here, you may have heard about the BEAD program that was initiated by the Biden administration, but now it has been kind of taken over by the Trump administration. Basically, here is a great example of where there is $42 billion allocated to providing great internet access to all people in America. Under the Biden administration, it was actually very focused on fiber deployment.
The problem with fiber deployment is it's actually very, very expensive because you have to trench, and it can be unreliable because if you break the fiber, the whole neighborhood goes out. The other real problem is it takes a long time. Basically there are targets of five to seven years in terms of deployment of fiber across America. It was quite unrealistic. It's really closer to 15 to 20 years deployment. With our technology, it's about one-tenth the cost of deployment, and it can be done very quickly. The Trump administration has come in and are in the process of making a very fundamental policy change, which is going from fiber only to whatever technology solves the problem. This is a really important step for us in terms of getting access to government funding that was not available over the last four years.
Really from a market perspective, the two great opportunities for us globally are what we call the DUNE opportunity for denser environments around the world and also in America using the BEAD funds to really outfit all of America with high-speed internet. By the way, some of the data rates in this marketplace are in the order of 2 Gbps . I'm not sure if that means a lot to a lot of people, but basically getting 1 gigabit with fiber, it's actually very, very high speed. We can support up to 2 Gbps , which is obviously very competitive with fiber as well. Now, tactical communications, this is a new marketplace that we've kind of entered over the last, let's say, 18 months. I'll go back to that original slide where we had the beam. I showed you the beamforming.
The issue there is that what they found in the Ukraine war and certainly in Gaza is that the enemy can detect where you are with traditional wireless communications. This is a real problem. I think you may have even heard anecdotal stories where people are using traditional wireless to communicate, but the problem is the enemy can track that and then bomb your position. That's actually happened. What the military is looking for is a technology that actually communicates without being detectable. Because we have that beamforming technology, it makes it not detectable on the battlefield or what we refer to as low probability of detection. Basically, it's close to zero. The other benefit of it is it actually is quite immune to jamming as well.
Basically we are engaged with several military and defense contractors. Actually, there's one in particular we just announced two weeks ago that is really not so much a defense device, but a safety device that really is a way of saving lives on the battlefield. Basically the first deployment is about an army of about 70,000 soldiers. For us, that's about a $10-$15 million opportunity. Really the full opportunity is the entire NATO defense forces, which is about three and a half million soldiers. The only way you can solve the safety problem that we've addressed, which we can share in about a month in terms of the specifics of that. Right now we'll start shipping this quarter in terms of that contract. This is a very, very exciting opportunity.
If you look at all of the opportunities in military, for example, we're working with another military contractor where he's doing real-time network setup, what we call it dynamic network setup in a battlefield environment. Again, using our technology for stealth communications in the military environment. Oh. Yeah, the other benefit, oh, this is actually quite interesting. The other benefit we bring to the military is because we're in the unlicensed band, which again, I'm not going to dive into too much technical detail, but because we're in the unlicensed band, militaries can actually deploy anywhere in the world without interfering with licenses that the carriers might have bought. That's a very strong advantage for us as well. Like in terms of engagements, right now we're at 83, but you can see this picture here is actually quite important to us.
We have 67 products in the marketplace right now. One of the things when we first went public on NASDAQ, we really only had about a couple of customers. That has really changed because over the last four years, three or four years, we've actually now engaged with 83 customers and 67 products in the marketplace. We really are the dominant player in this space. It is a growing business. We expect this year to be stronger than we did last year and growth about 50% again next year. Just to close off, we are the premier global supplier of these products in the 60 GHz space. We're shipping into high-growth markets with over 100 distinct customer engagements in our pipeline. Our original business thesis of spectrum saturation is driving the need for millimeter wave spectrum.
Additional features that we've seen is stealth operation is really expected to make a significant contribution to our growth.
I think that's about it for today. Jim is our primary contact. Sheldon Group is our investor relations contact. Any questions? Going once. Okay, thank you very much.