Airvana

Details

Published on Tuesday, 04 September 2007 11:27

Written by David Chambers

Airvana are headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusets, USA with a development centre in India 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 used to offers a complete CDMA radio access networks for outdoor (macro) use, differentiated by only using IP architecture, and this was sold to Ericsson in 2013, leaving them to focus 100% on small cells.

Airvana has partnerships with several major suppliers including Hitachi, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. 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 originally 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 had 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 would resell their CDMA femtocells.

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

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 3G product.

The company interworks with the Taqua (formerly Tatara) Femtocell Convergence Server to provide a complete end-to-end solution that is 3GPP2 standards compliant.

The company continues to develop new product with a long term view that multimode 3G/LTE femtocells will be dominant. Freescale was selected as their silicon supplier for their latest multi-mode product. Their LTE small cell was demonstrated jointly with Hitachi in November 2011.

Commercial Success

Airvana's 3G CDMA standards compliant femtocell was launched by Sprint USA in November 2010 and by KDDI Japan. The unit can handle 6 concurrent calls, and is dual-mode 1xRTT and EV-DO, incorporating an optional wireline phone socket that allows the mobile operator to offer VoIP service.

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 rebranded itself as the 3G CDMA Femtocell Company, and has supplied more 3G CDMA femtocells than any other company worldwide.

ABI believed Airvana had leapfrogged other femtocell suppliers during 2011, both in shipments and revenues, but that its reliance on CDMA restricted its market opportunity.

Airvana company website