Vendor Airspan adds Wi-Fi backhaul to third-generation Magic Box
With more than 260,000 units distributed to consumers and businesses, last week during Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles Sprint announced the third-generation of its plug-and-play, all-wireless Magic Box small cell.
Network infrastructure vendor Airspan is the driving force behind Magic Box, which was initially introduced by Sprint since May 2017. The unit supports LTE-Advanced features 4X4 MIMO, 256 QAM and three-channel carrier aggregation. The end result, according to the companies, is an average increase in download speeds of 250%.
Sprint touts the benefits of the in-building small cell as three-fold:
- “A single device covers an average-sized small business,
- “Extends data coverage to benefit Sprint customers in nearby buildings,
- “And improves street-level network performance.”
The carrier’s Chief Technology Officer John Saw said Magic Box “leverag[es] advanced technology and our vast 2.5 GHz spectrum to benefit businesses deploying the units and our Sprint customers in the vicinity. Sprint Magic Box is another great solution we are using to continually improve data coverage and speeds to provide a better experience for our customers.”
The device has made quite a splash since hitting the market. Earlier this year the product won the GSMA’s Global Mobile award for “Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough,” awarded during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and followed that with winning the Small Cell Forum’s “Excellence in Commercial Deployment (Residential)” honor.
One of the key drives of Magic Box adoption is ease of installation. It’s an all wireless unit that’s effectively plug and play; whoever is deploying the unit, enterprise or residential, doesn’t have to worry about running cables or tuning after it’s live.
Following the Glomo win at Mobile World Congress, we caught up with Airspan’s Damiano Coletti, VP of Strategy and Marketing, to get more insight into how the vendor approaches small cell design and deployment. Check out that video interview below.
