Airvana are headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusets, USA with a development centre in India and provide CDMA basestation equipment to operators. They have been very successful with their 3G CDMA product and is one of the very 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. New LTE products were launched during 2014.
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 primarily focussed on the CDMA femtocell markets in USA and Japan. In 2014, they announced LTE products suitable for the global marketplace including OneCell, a solution comprising central controller and remote radio units designed for larger buildings.
In 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. 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 CDMA solution that is 3GPP2 standards compliant.
Commercial Success
Airvana's 3G CDMA standards compliant femtocell was launched by Sprint USA in November 2010 and later 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.
In 2012, Airvana and Taqua partnered to launch a "Small Cell as a Service" for 3G CDMA, aimed at North American operators and introducing the term "femtocloud".
The company launched its new OneCell LTE product for the Enterprise at Small Cell World Summit, June 2014, shown on the right.
