Carrier-certified small cells that can be directly purchased by the enterprise give companies a way to take control of their cellular connectivity needs, but bringing these products to market is complicated. Corning made it clear that it wants to move this market along when it purchased small cell pioneer SpiderCloud Wireless earlier this year. Now, Corning is adding license-assisted access to its set of enterprise solutions.
“The newest addition to the Corning SpiderCloud enterprise RAN small cell product line is the SCRN-320, an LTE-U/LAA enterprise small cell, capable of supporting one licensed channel, supplemented with up to two unlicensed channels,” said Corning’s Bill Cune, VP for wireless market development. “The SCRN-320 is currently approved by Verizon and can be purchased by the enterprise. We anticipate this offering to include other Tier One operators contingent upon approvals and certifications.”
Sprint is testing the SCRN-320, after announcing last month that it will offer SpiderCloud small cells to enterprise customers. Sprint’s outgoing COO for technology, Guenther Ottendorfer, said in December that Sprint achieved speeds of 120-140 Mpbs with SpiderCloud’s LAA small cell, using just 5 megahertz of licensed spectrum. Corning has also said SpiderCloud small cells are approved for AT&T’s network, but AT&T has not made any specific announcements about the SCRN-320.
Cune said SpiderCloud fits in well with the Corning ONE (Optical Network Evolution) platform, which is meant to support a heterogenous indoor network. Corning sees several potential uses for SpiderCloud small cells.
“We think SpiderCloud radio nodes out at the edge of our network on a Corning ONE software-defined LAN is a good solution,” Cune said. “We also think SpiderCloud sources at the headend of the Corning ONE DAS is a very good solution. So what we’re trying to create with SpiderCloud … is an enterprise-friendly end-to-end solution that can be purchased by the enterprise.”
Cune added that enterprise-ready solutions are not limited to small cells. He said the Corning portfolio also includes distributed antenna system products that can be “purchased and deployed by operators, third-party owners or building owners.”
