Dec 17, 2007 12:14 PM,

Turin Networks sees CDMA upside in Carrier Access buy

By Ed Gubbins

Turin Network eyes CACS’s pseudowire gear, R&D pipeline

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Turin Networks today announced its intent to acquire Carrier Access for $92.7 million in cash, planning to exploit products in the latter’s development pipeline as well as expand its gear into CDMA networks.

Carrier Access sold equipment to migrate the access networks surrounding wireless base stations from GSM to next-generation technologies based on IP and Ethernet. Turin’s flagship gear, more focused on aggregation and transport, sat just upstream in the network, performing similar duties, though Turin too has some wireless access products.

One of the key drivers for the acquisition was Turin’s intent to use its own technology to bring Carrier Access’ equipment to a broader wireless market, one that includes CDMA wireless networks.

“[Carrier Access’s] technology was geared heavily toward a GSM, UMTS kind of network,” said Bruce Miller, Turin’s acting chief technology officer. “They implemented a lot of specific algorithms. But a lot of things can move it to a CDMA class of network. They have the ability to do things like circuit emulation of DS-1s through Ethernet with pseudowires. We have technology that can terminate some of the CDMA technology. If you look at CDMA, everything is carried over PPP or multilink PPP. The Traverse PacketEdge 1200 is targeted for business applications. It takes PPP and interworks with Ethernet. So the Carrier Access and Turin technology can do some very unique things for the CDMA market, which is one of the things we’re looking at.”

In the near term, privately held Turin expects Carrier Access to add 30% to 40% to its own annual revenue, which Turin claims has been doubling in recent years.

Though there is plenty of overlap in the two vendors’ customer bases (both are substantially but not entirely based in North America), the acquisition does give Turin a large customer it didn’t have before: AT&T, which contributed 16% (or nearly $4 million) of the nearly $24 million in total revenue Carrier Access reported for the first three months of this year.

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