Airspan says its private networks and FWA opportunities are growing, but chipset challenges remain
Airspan reported second-quarter revenues up 12% year-over-year but saw a year-over-year increase in its quarterly loss as it continues to deal with chipset-related delays.
The company reported second-quarter revenues of $46.9 million, which was an increase of 12% compared to the same time last year and up 25% from the first quarter of 2022. Airspan saw a net loss of $21 million for the quarter — less than the nearly $30 million that it lost during the first quarter of 2022, but more than the $10.4 million it lost during the second quarter of 2021.
On Airspan’s call with analysts this morning, company executives described overall positive momentum that is being challenged by component availability. In the case of its customer Gogo and its air-to-ground 4G/5G Open RAN network for aircraft connectivity, Airspan executives said that they are shipping 5G base stations and about two-thirds of the way through the ground station deployment. But they’re only able to ship 4G air cards that go into the planes, because the 5G air-card chipset has been delayed by about six months.
Airspan sees opportunities ahead in both the U.S. and the U.K. as those governments fund efforts to support Open RAN development and adoptions, and it also says that it has a “very fast-growing” private network business and expanding opportunities in Fixed Wireless Access. In June, the company had announced successful tests of its Mimosa 6-series FWA solution for the 6 GHz band with rural ISP Resound Networks.
Tyson Curtis, CEO of Resound Networks said in a statement at the time that, using Airspan’s equipment, Resound was able to “[exceed] our gigabit-tier distance expectations in the 6 GHz band by 50% reaching out to over 3 miles.”
The company says it is seeing in-building deployments of its solutions in lieu of Distributed Antenna Systems; executives said that Airspan’s offerings can be deployed at 34% of the cost of a DAS and that it is seeing “blocks of orders of 15 to 20 buildings at a time”. The company also reports seeing “positive contagion” in private networks, where when one type of customer such as an airport uses its solution successfully, it not only gets add-on business to expand that particular network, but it has been able to win other airport customers. Airspan said that during the second quarter, it added more than 60 private 4G/5G networks to its design wins, which now total more than 300.
