UK cellular broadcast specialist IP Wireless has re-emerged after its US parent, NextWave Wireless, dramatically cut its outgoings and cut the company lose back in September. Frantic negotiations have seen IP Wireless separate as a management buy out with long term financing from what it describes as a ‘significant strategic partner.’
To us this means that IP Wireless could not find a private equity group or VC funder and was forced to work from its existing customer base. The most obvious company to have baled it out would be France Telecom’s Orange, which is in the middle of a UK based mobile TV trial, using the IP Wireless TDtv technology, a combination of the MBMS base station software and TDD transmitters added to those base stations plus an Asic chip in the handset.
NextWave acquired both IP Wireless and PacketVideo to fill out its WiMAX video offerings, and as it now concentrates on its chip business, it had no money left over to spend on the only two parts of the company that were making revenues.
PacketVideo still has no home as far as we know, but has a decent amount of revenue from building video software stacks for portable devices, including some of the Sirius Satellite Radio products.
NextWave emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a few years ago with oodles of spectrum, seeking to be a one-stop shop for operators, offering everything from chips to networks to spectrum. It is now running on a severely watered-down version of that vision, just focused on WiMAX chips.
While working under NextWave IP Wireless adapted its broadcast offerings to sit on WiMAX base stations, using the MBS (Multimedia Broadcasting System) built into wave two WiMAX products. It call the product MXtv and since this is not mentioned at all in the announcement, that technology is either staying with NextWave or the company is going back to its roots and focusing purely on a 3GPP product roadmap, to conserve it energies. If MXtv had been part of its future, IP Wireless might have found funding from a variety of WiMAX partners, but now it looks more likely that a strategic partner would have to be a cellular equipment maker or operator.
In 2007, IPWireless announced that it had provided more than 600 base stations and 2,000 sectors of capacity to power T-Mobile’s “Internet 4G” service, which covers more than 60% of the Czech Republic and delivers over 10 terabytes of data each day. So T-Mobile is another company which might have had reason to bail it out.
In early 2008 IP Wireless announced a commercial pilot of TDtv with Orange and T-Mobile in West and Central London and the fact that IPWireless says it remains committed to this trial implies that one or both of the partners is behind the buyout.
The company was acquired in May 2007 by NextWave Wireless and became part of the NextWave Network Products division. In an announcement on December 26, 2008 NextWave disclosed that it had sold 75 percent of IPWireless to IPW Holdings, an entity formed by the senior IPWireless management team. The company will continue to have its two primary locations in San Bruno, California and Chippenham, UK.