Airvana are headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusets, USA and provide CDMA basestation equipment to operators. They offer their HubBub femtocell, a 3G CDMA product and is one of the few CDMA femtocell manufacturers. The company also offers complete CDMA radio access networks for outdoor (macro) use, differentiated by only using IP architecture.

Airvana has partnerships with several major suppliers including Hitachi and Motorola. They believe that operators want to deal primarily with their encumbent vendors, to ensure integration with billing, network management and existing operational systems.

History

Airvana tried to address both the CDMA and UMTS femtocell markets, developing the CDMA product in-house from their own existing product line and acquiring the Cambridge UK based 3-Way networks for a UMTS product.

In September 2007, Airvana confirmed interoperability with Nokia Siemens Network femto gateway for UMTS. Voice calls have already been made and further interoperability testing continues. Both femtocell and femto gateway can be sold independently.

January 2008, announced selection of Motive's HDM solution which uses the TR-069 standard for remote device management (HDM = Home Device Manager).

March 2008, announced a global OEM agreement with Motorola , who will resell their CDMA femtocells.

October 2008,  Hitachi and Airvana agreed a suupply arrangement for Airvana CDMA femtocells and gateways into the Japanese market - winning business at KDDI, the large Japanese CDMA network operator.

Overall, Airvana's products are used by more than 30 CDMA operators worldwide, including Bell Mobility, Sprint, Telefonica, Telus and Verizon Wireless.

The company's headquarter's are in Chelmsford, Massachussetts USA with development centres also in Bangalore and India.

In the video below from 2008, Paul Callahan explains the history of Airvana, through its OEM agreement with Nortel to supply EV-DO outdoor basestations, then covers what a femtocell is. He predicts market demand of 400,000 units in the US (50% each CDMA and UMTS technology), growing quickly to millions of units in 2009. He quotes operators as driving "brutal" demands in their RFPs for femtocells, requiring many features.

Texas Instruments are reported to claim that Airvana use their DSP as the main chipset platform in their product.

Commercial Success

Airvana's 3G CDMA standards compliant femtocell was launched by Sprint USA in November 2010 and by KDDI Japan.

During 2010, the company restructured and sold off it's UMTS femtocell assets (mostly the original 3-Way staff/office/IPR based in Cambridge UK), to focus on CDMA. It has rebranded itself as the 3G CDMA Femtocell Company.

Airvana company website