By Timothy Sanders

A Legacy of Technology Growth
Today Airspan fields multiple broadband wireless products sold around the world in spectrum ranges from 700 MHz to 6 GHz. Its products range from point-to-point (PTP) to point-to-multipoint (PtMP) radio systems. Airspan's revenues for 2005 totaled $110 million and its worldwide individual customer base exceeds 300 clients. It operates in over 100 countries out of 17 offices around the world. In short, Airspan is a major player in the broadband wireless industry.

How Airspan grew from a management buyout start-up to a market leading innovator is the fascinating story of a company that continually reinvented itself through acquisition and new technologies.

Bootstrapping to a Powerhouse
Airspan's roots germinated back in 1992 as the code division multiple access (CDMA) wireless product division of DSC Communications---which was acquired by Alcatel in 1998. Prior to the sale however, in February of 1998, a group of internal managers saw an opportunity and leveraged a $17 million buyout to spin Airspan out as a stand alone company vending CDMA technology solutions.

Early results were sterling. The company did very well during the 1998 to 2000 period as the telecom boom reached its peak. In fact, in Mid-2000 Airspan launched a successful IPO on the NASDAQ.

Early Forays
With the IPO complete and C-round funding in place, Airspan went on a bit of an acquisition tear.

"Our first acquisition was a product division of Marconi Wireless based in Israel, called WipLL," said Paul Senior, vice president of Marketing & Product Management for Airspan and a WiMAX Forum board member. "This product line is still a major core of our offerings today, although greatly expanded."

Airspan then bought Nortel's Proximity business which garnered the company what is still its largest customer, Axtel, the number two local loop operator in Mexico after Mextel.

"Axtel is 100 percent wireless," said Senior. "Axtel is the only successful wireless local loop operator ever."

Senior added that Axtel did $50 million in business with Airspan last year. Axtel uses a proprietary Proximity radio that provides switched versus Ethernet-based capability.

These acquisitions established a firm base for Airspan. They also comprised two of the current four business units the company operates.

Voice as a Primary Strategy
Shortly after the Proximity acquisition Airspan also bought Arelnet, an Israeli-based softswitch company for $8 million. Not only did this acquisition offer Airspan voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and session initiation protocol (SIP) products to offer carriers, the company also believes it conveyed design advantages and experience with VoIP products that enabled its wireless group to deliver more capable carrier class VoIP support with its radios.

"One thing we learned is that simple prioritization methods are not enough for VoIP," said Senior. "As SIP call loads climb on a network, eventually they all have priority."

Senior added that Airspan's systems calculate wireless network capacity on the fly. They also use call admission control, which monitors radio load. For example, when SIP based calls are made, this system intercepts the SIP packet and verifies that there is sufficient network capacity to route the call; If not it blocks the call with a fast busy response.

Additionally its systems can parse both cell and basestation information for delivery to 911 operators in the event of an emergency call. Basically, it has built in 911 support.

"We offer a SIP proxy server that sits between the softswitch and the base station," said Senior. "We can also provide full softswitch services for customers as well."

Extensive voice and softswitch experience seems to inform Airspan's thinking across all of its product lines.

Enter the Municipal Wi-Fi Game
Late in 2005 Airspan entered the Wi-Fi game with the purchase, for $1.9 million, of Radionet, a Helsinki, Finland based Metropolitan network Wi-Fi supplier.

"Our take is that Wi-Fi at the edge coupled with a WiMAX backhaul network is optimum for metropolitan networks," explained Senior. "We look at mesh systems as a house of cards."

Senior added that Airspan believes its WiMAX coupled with Wi-Fi solutions are far cheaper than mesh systems. He also asserted that the company's extensive experience with VoIP across wireless influences its assessment that multiple hops on mesh systems relegate VoIP delivery to a "best effort" proposition on those systems. Airspan shoots for a much higher VoIP quality delivery standard with its products. Radionet possesses patented technology that facilitates roaming between Wi-Fi cells.

Obviously its strategies have garnered the company customers. It has also experienced some recent and large customer wins. In fact, Airspan delivers products in both direct channels as well as several indirect channels.

This partnering strategy seems very natural to Airspan which is heavily focused on research and development.

"We have around 300 employees, over half of whom are focused on R&D," said Senior. "We use Flextronics and Selectron to manufacture our designs."

Customers, Customers Everywhere
Certainly Airspan sells its products directly. However, it has cagily elected to leverage indirect channels as well. Perhaps its best known relationships are with Ericsson and Nortel who are considered part of its original equipment manufacturer (OEM) channel. Nortel licensed Airspan technology to deliver 802.16d Fixed WiMAX products in the near term while it works to develop its own 802.16e Mobile WiMAX product lines. Nortel, particularly has been more open about some of its customer wins with this gear.

Airspan also maintains a re-seller channel with partners such as Marconi and Fujitsu. Senior estimates that all channels combined probably support over 500 individual customers worldwide. Airspan expects to ship between 100,000 and 200,000 customer premise equipment (CPE) units in 2006.

One particularly large new direct customer is Japan's Yozan. This $42 million contract will comprise a network of 3,000 basestations and 30,000 Wi-Fi capable access points. This AS.MAX product utilizes a WiMAX connection to the basestation with Wi-Fi broadcast capability at the edge. This network is being delivered in the 4.9 GHz range.

"This is easily our biggest contract of the past year," said Senior. "This 4.9 GHz gear is based on the same product profile as 5.8 GHz WiMAX and it gives us a 4.9 GHz product for the US market."

Senior added that the company is deploying in Japan utilizing a contention protocol similar to that required for the 3.65 GHz spectrum range in the US. The company uses a carrier sense technique to detect and protect signal paths with first deployments getting protection. The company also intends to proffer a 5 GHz WiMAX line this summer.

With this experience base, Airspan believes it could easily field gear for the 3.65 GHz spectrum range in the US. It has already done so for the emerging 700 MHz spectrum bands in the US.

WiMAX For the Future
Airspan's impetus to adopt WiMAX began with a number of struggles to make the economics of broadband wireless really work.

"About two and a half years ago we got involved with 802.16 and quickly saw it as the future," said Senior. "We shifted all of our lines to WiMAX versions based on that belief."

Senior explained that Airspan chose to avoid the marketplace until it had certified solutions. Today it boasts one base station and two CPE units that are certified. The company's solutions support both time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD).

"In general FDD products serve a mass market focus," asserted Senior. "In the 3.5 GHz band worldwide, FDD is more traditional, although most early WiMAX gear is based on TDD---that is okay if the spectrum is new in the country."

Airspan believes that the economic savings from WiMAX at the vendor level will translate very quickly to carriers.

"For us the cost of ASICs [application specific integrated circuit] is a huge savings," said Senior. "We used to have to build our own, now we can get them from Intel for one-tenth the cost."

Senior added that Airspan expects CPE prices to hover around $250 to $300 early in 2006 with expectations of seeing it fall below $200 by the end of the year.

For its WiMAX approach Airspan chose to invest in high end basestation capabilities. Its reasoning was simple.

"We decided upon a Dual MAC/PHY capability built into each basestation blade," said Senior. "Our hardware supports both 802.16d and 802.16e capability within each blade with a software upgrade."

The potential cash cost savings for customers wishing to convert or upgrade all or part of their networks to Mobile WiMAX at a later date are obvious as the physical cost and effort in people, time and materials of adding additional basestation blades or hardware is significant.

In looking to the future, the company plans a universal serial bus (USB) approach to the 802.16e hardware it is developing for Japan. This device will essentially be a quad band radio that can operate in 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz the 3.3-3.7 GHz range and 4.9 to 5.4 GHz bands. This kind of flexibility does create some potential pitfalls however.

"Now everyone wants to talk to us about one-off solutions," concluded Senior. "We have to be careful not to do too many complex projects at once."

Conclusions
Airspan has proven itself not only a broadband wireless survivor but a market leader as well. The company has demonstrated a willingness to alter its focus and product lines when it sees future advantage for its customers.

Clearly the company believes this flexibility of thought will help it secure a strong future amongst global WiMAX radio vendors.  

Tim Sanders is President of TheFinalMile, Inc., a broadband wireless consulting group. His experience came from running a multistate Wireless ISP. He can be reached at tim@thefinalmile.net or 828-505-0702.