We don’t know the details of the deal, but it is official that Corning has acquired SpiderCloud Wireless, significantly bolstering its reach into the enterprise in-building wireless market, and adding a major complement to its fiber-fed distributed antenna system offerings.
By way of a quick recap, let’s examine how major DAS players are positioned in terms of small cell product integration. In addition to Corning, CommScope has products that run the gamut from fiber to DAS to small cells. Your other big DAS players are ADRF, JMA Wireless and Solid Technologies–all five of which are confirmed Verizon DAS vendors.
On the small cell side, CommScope got into the mix with its 2015 acquisition of Airvana, now the Corning-SpiderCloud tie-up. In terms of standalone small cell vendors, you’ve got ip.access, which has a fairly innovative multi-carrier small cell offering; Airspan, which developed its Magic Box product in conjunction with Sprint and SoftBank; then Baicells, the brainchild of a former Huawei exec, which is working to gain share in the North American market.
So what does all that mean?
Randall Schwartz, a senior analyst and principal consultant at Wireless 20/20, emphasized the need for strong alignment of DAS and small cell portfolios.
“I think that SpiderCloud/Corning will have the same challenge that Airvana/CommScope have,” Schwartz told RCR Wireless News. They need to develop a coordinated product strategy where 1+1=3.” Schwartz said, based on his observations, that CommScope has yet to develop a “coordinated strategy” marrying the two product lines.
“We will see how this plays out,” he continued. “JMA and Solid are focused on improved DAS architectures, rather than integrating a small cell solution. So, we will see if there are dance partners for the other,” standalone small cell vendors.
SpiderCloud’s Enterprise-RAN solution can provide “up to 200 sectors of UMTS or LTE capacity inside buildings as large as 1.5 million-square-feet, with five bars of coverage,” according to the company. The offerings comprises radio nodes and a service node that controls the radio nodes.
According to Zack’s Equity Research, “Telecom operators like Verizon and Vodafone recognize E-RAN’s expertise in delivering high indoor capacity. SpiderCloud notes that a dual-carrier LTE system with just 24 radio nodes can offer more than 2.5 Gbps of throughput, enough to stream 500 HD video streams. An E-RAN system with 100 radio nodes can do four times as much. We note that the addition of SpiderCloud will help Corning to offer indoor cellular solutions. The expansion of the company’s product portfolio will help it to rapidly penetrate the wireless network equipment market going forward.”
