Airwalk was founded in 2002 in Richardson, Texas to focus on developing small picocell and femtocell basestations for the CDMA marketplace. It had limited success with Sprint and Verizon. The company was bought by Ubee Interactive in 2012 and organised to operate as an independent subsiduary. There has been little visible marketing activity or new product launches, and the company is not thought to be pursuing this line of business further.
Overall Product Portfolio
Ubee-Airwalk had a small cell portfolio primarily aimed at the Enterprise sector. Its parent company, Ubee Interactive, has been successful with a range of residential set top boxes.
CDMA products
Ubee-Airwalk offered a range of enterprise femtocell, picocell and microcell CDMA basestation products.
Their residential femtocell product, branded Edgepoint was first announced in March 2007. The higher capacity enterprise version, Edgepoint PRO, followed in March 2008.
The EdgePoint femtocells support both 2G and 3G CDMA (1xRTT and EVDO Rev A), and operate in either the 800 or 1900Mhz band. The self-configuring, plug-and-play features make for easy installation.
Clusters of enterprise femtocells offer call handoff between each other for superior call continuity.
The architecture combines a base station transceiver, base station controller, and network interfaces into a single unit, and can be configured for either 1xEV-DO Rev. A or 1xRTT, thus enabling high speed data whilst maintaining compatability with older CDMA voice handsets.
An early Partnership with Tarata (now Taqua) ensuring interoperability with their 3GPP2 standards compliant Femtocell Convergence Server, allow Airwalk femtocells to operate within the 3G CDMA femtocell standard.
The latest versions of the enterprise and residential femtocell products are shown below.
Sprint adopted their Edgepoint PRO 3G CDMA enterprise femtocell in their network in 2011.
LTE Small Cell Products
A program of LTE femtocell product development led to an end-to-end solution demonstration in 2011.
Announced in 2010, the selection of Mindspeed Transcede chipset for their 4G product, with software developed with Aricent. The picocell relies on Aricent's software solution to provide a robust platform. It incorporates selected elements from the Aricent LTE eNodeB stack portfolio and included the industry's first Layer 2 stack for multi-core implementations.
Announced their use of RF front end chips from Lime Microsystems, allowing a wide range of different frequency bands to be supported. Physical products were demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in February 2011.
Airwalk announced their selection of Qualcomm's FSM femtocell chipset in June 2011.
The company's declared intention was to develop tri-mode small cells which combine both CDMA and LTE, initially by stacking of individual modules and later a fully integrated product.
In 2014, their website reverted to a single page indicating they were still in business for Small Cells and IP-RAN products as a subsiduary of UbeeInteractive.
Comments
RSS feed for comments to this post