IPWireless returns to the U.S. carrier market

After narrowly failing to make the cut in Sprint’s mobile broadband contest in 2006, IPWireless took a hiatus from the North American commercial networks market, choosing to focus its time-division CDMA efforts on the government sector and operators overseas. But after a four-year spell, IPWireless is back, announcing today a new "network-in-a-box" modular broadband wireless system that it is targeted squarely at small and rural providers.

While it may seem like IPWireless vanished for a while, it’s actually been hiding in plain side, said Jon Hambidge, IP’s chief marketing officer. Shortly after the Sprint deal fell through, IPWireless was swallowed up by NextWave, which coughed the vendor back up again two years later, selling it back to the IPWireless management for a fraction of the $100 million it originally paid. During and after its spell with NextWave, IPWireless continued to focus on Europe, selling its time division duplexing (TDD) 3G mobile broadband and mobile TV technology to operators with unpaired spectrum, which couldn’t support the much more well-known split-spectrum version of the 3GPP standard, wideband-CDMA. In the U.S., it partnered with Northrop Grumman to sell its systems to government agencies. If you live in New York, Hambidge said, there’s an IPWireless 3G network right under your nose: New York City deployed its technology across all five boroughs to support 53 different communications and data applications for 19 city and state organizations.

Last August, though, IPWireless deployed its first commercial network in the U.S., a TD-CDMA network at 700 MHz for the South Georgia Regional Information Technology Authority and USA Choice Internet Services Co., a provider of Internet services to the underserved economic areas in northwest and central Pennsylvania. Hambidge said IPWireless began to see a growing opportunity for its technology, if not with the big operators than smaller regional and rural ones.

“We developed network-in-a-box in response to customer demand,” Hambidge said in an e-mail interview. “Our customers’ applications span a wide range, and this system provides the flexibility and performance necessary to support the various scenarios. At this point, we are focusing our efforts in those markets where our solutions deliver the greatest value, including state and local governments and rural broadband providers.”

The network-in-a-box is actually a compact modular TD-CDMA system, designed to be deployed in any small-scale launch scenario. As a stand-alone network it can support up 16,000 subscribers for a small operator, but it can also serve as an emergency or temporary coverage system, expanding a larger carrier’s network during a disaster or during a special event. The system comes preconfigured for either the 700 MHz or 2.5 GHz bands, the two primary 4G bands in the U.S. and can be deployed in TDD or FDD configurations. And if deployed as a permanent network, the architecture can be upgraded to LTE in the future.

Unlike wideband-CDMA — the flavor of 3G deployed by T-Mobile and AT&T — TD-CDMA doesn’t divide the send and receive paths over separate channels. Instead it uses the same spectrum, alternating between send and receive transmissions at time intervals. The advantage of such a setup, particularly for mobile data, is the ability to allocate only the necessary number of uplink timeslots in any given situation. For example if customers are only downloading data and not making voice calls or using synchronous data applications, almost the entirety of the spectrum can be designated for the downlink, doubling the capacity available on the network. In the cases where IPWireless is deploying in paired bands, such as 700 MHz, it simply creates two TDD channels and runs them over what would normally be the uplink and downlink channels.