Spidercloud Wireless, the start-up which has pioneered ‘Enterprise RAN’ platforms for indoor small cell networks, has scored its first commercial operator deal with Vodafone Netherlands.
The initial public real world deal is always a breakthrough moment for a company seeking to promote a new architecture, though it comes as no surprise that Vodafone should back the technology. It has helped to incubate Spidercloud and has run trials of the E-RAN systems. In February, the two companies offered some details of their collaboration, saying that the operator ‘helped assess the commercial need for the solution, provided laboratory facilities and helped run both technical and field trials’ including some in UK enterprises.
Spidercloud claims it will soon announce further customers, with deals in the US and Latin America likely to be made public in the next six months. Earlier this year it said it was engaged in more than 10 market trials, many via its key infrastructure partner, Japan’s NEC, while NEC itself said it was bidding E-RAN into about 20 contracts.
‘We can now, more rapidly than ever, address the needs of thousands of enterprise customers who rely on mobile connectivity and services for business productivity,’ said Marcel van den Biggelaar, head of technology strategy at Vodafone Netherlands. ‘Previously we were restricted by the cost and time it took to install legacy in-building wireless systems or the lack of scalability of first generation small cells.’
By establishing central control and self-organizing network (SON) capabilities within the enterprise, the Spidercloud system claims to support broader coverage than conventional small cells; and lower cost, more easily deployable capacity than another established option, DAS (Distributed Antenna System). It also boasts of its scalability ‘ up to 100 self-optimizing 3G/LTE/Wi-FI radio nodes can be supported by one central services node (SCSN) linked to the operator’s network. The system can handle over 100,000 data sessions and hand-offs a day with just one connection to the carrier’s core, allowing for scalability in large enterprises or venues.
In Vodafone’s case, the operator is initially rolling out 46 radio nodes over three floors, to support a customer with 400 staff. It reports that the rate of dropped calls is about 0.2%, lower than when using the mobile macro network indoors. According to LightReading, the largest of the trials with Vodafone has involved 65 nodes supporting 3,000 users on 16 floors.
The access points themselves support Power over Ethernet and have transmit power options from 100mW to 250mW. Options consist of the SCRN-200 with 16/32 channels and 3G small cell; the SCRN-300 with 16/32 3G channels and dual-radio Wi-Fi; and the SCRN-210 with 64 LTE channels supporting 2×2 MIMO. Operators can co-deploy the various nodes and manage them with a single SCSN, which makes all the cells appear as a single node to the evolved packet core (EPC) in LTE; and the 3G Iuh-standard gateway.
The SCSN acts as the local control point for the small cell enterprise network, handling functions like cell coordination and inter-small cell signaling (soft handover signaling for 3G and X2 signaling for LTE). This saves every small cell having to connect back to the cellco’s gateways individually. The architecture also enables Local IP Access (LIPA), for local switching and local break-out, which is needed to ensure inter-small cell mobility, and localized services or content caching.
SpiderCloud has raised $105m in venture capital from Charles River Ventures, Matrix Partners, Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures but faces tough battles ahead as giants like Cisco get serious about the enterprise small cell space.