For the enterprise, small cell or hybrid DAS/small cell makes more business sense, Johnson says
Nick Johnson founded ip.access in 1999, and is now the chief technology officer of one of the few remaining companies that solely focuses on small cell technology. Major infrastructure players like Ericsson and Nokia have product portfolios, but, in the last few years, specialized firms have been scooped up by larger companies–CommScope’s acquisition of Airvana and Corning’s recent acquisition of SpiderCloud Wireless, for instance.
“I think it’s an interesting situation,” Johnson said of the market consolidation trend. “We’re sort of out on the promontory here at the moment feeling the weather on our own. I think every event almost has its own logic. It is curious that both Airvana and SpiderCloud were bought by DAS companies. I think you can see the rationale there, and there’s a definite trend, I would say away from DAS, but people as seeing DASs as an expensive and unreliable way of doing in-building. And not unreliable from a technical point of view, but a commercial point of view. You can invest several $100,000 in a DAS solution for an enterprise and find that one or zero operators actually connect to it and find yourself with this stranded investment. The whole point of doing the DAS is it improves the value of your building.
He continued: “There’s this huge segment of enterprise that’s desperate for multi-operator services.” When tenants don’t have adequate cellular, “They don’t blame the operator, they blame the venue, so it has a real impact on the value of that asset. When you want to deploy something that’s neutral host capable…they’re seeing that DAS isn’t the solution. It’s well known, I think, that Verizon has started pressing its enterprise design teams to deploy small cells rather than DAS, and I think that trend is going to continue. I think the DAS companies acquiring small cell technology companies is a natural reaction to that.”
Johnson said it would be “premature” to discuss any potential partnership or M&A activity as it relates to ip.access.
He also shared his perspective on shared access to spectrum, which, in the U.S. targets the 3.5 GHz CBRS band and, in Europe, Licensed Shared Access (LSA) targets the 2.3 GHz band. “One of the things that’s going on in Europe,” Johnson said, “is noting. LSA seems to be kind of stalled. I think there’s a wait-and-see with CBRS. I think LSA was conceived as a way of bringing new licensees into spectrum…[but] it looks a little more like traditionally licensed spectrum.” He chalked the lack of progress in Europe, in part, to the fragmented regulatory environment. He said licensure schemes for shared access to new spectrum is “an experiment worth making. I hope that the rest of the world community that’s considering shared spectrum will see what’s happening in the U.S. and do something similar. We’re trying to encourage our own regulator in the U.K. to do the same. I do hope that CBRS activities do start to bear fruit very quickly.”
In a blog post, Johnson shared advice from Irish poet W.B. Yeats: “Do not wait to strike ’til the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”
Johnson noted that the consortium CBRS Alliance–like the MulteFire Alliance, which advocates for the all-unlicensed LTE technology that operates solely in unlicensed spectrum–are both contemplating private LTE networks for internet of things use cases, but cautioned the lack of device support, and ability of that model to scale.
“It’s not a market we’ve explored deeply,” he said, but, I’m not ruling it out entirely. It seems to be something that proprietary solutions and things that are out there, there are LoRa-based solutions, which people are putting together that have better reliability than Wi-Fi and are fit for purpose. Cellular solutions are struggling to find the scale and the price point. The device support as well. He recalled when GSM started up in the 1990s, when “The networks were way ahead of the handsets. Some with said that GSM really stood for ‘God Send Mobiles.’ Everyone had invested all this stuff in infrastructure and there were no handsets that anyone could afford.
On to 3G, ip.access recently passed 2 million shipments of licensure related to its 3G small cell technology, many to support an AT&T/Cisco MicroCell offering to bolster indoor coverage. “Wherever voice is important,” Johnson said, “it seems VoLTE is turning into such a difficult thing. People are still looking for some kind of 3G. We are still seeing people looking for 3G alongside LTE. He noted recent engagements and potential engagements with European and Asian customers. “There’s still some life in there, so we’re happy to continue to supply it.”
