RadioFrame to support Nextel iDEN network

After more than a year of silence, specialty base station vendor RadioFrame is making some big noise, announcing a huge deal with its old customer Nextel for a massive microcell deployment.

After several years of trialing RadioFrame's modular microcell base station gear for indoor coverage, Nextel has handed RadioFrame a massive base station deal for BTS hoteling and in-building coverage. RadioFrame vice president of sales and marketing Rick Applegate said the deal was in the tens-of-millions of dollars range, and while he wouldn't be more monetarily specific, he did reveal the scope of the deployment, saying Nextel would install more than 1000 basestations in different configurations over 2 years.

"This really provides validation for what we can do for a carrier," Applegate said. "This puts us on the map."

For a provider like Nextel, RadioFrame's compact basestation has particular advantages. Motorola doesn't manufacture an iDEN base station, making RadioFrame's compact and ultra-lightweight box (Applegate said the vendor weighs its unit in ounces) easily deployed in buildings and in dense urban locations where space is at a premium. While Nextel will continue to use RadioFrame's MC-Series for in-building spot coverage, most of the new rollouts will go toward base station hoteling, allowing Nextel to cram a whole bunch of base stations into one location using fiber to distribute that network capacity among numerous urban cell sites. Applegate said that 90% of the new contract's value would be for hoteling deployments.

RadioFrame's architecture was originally designed as an in-building solution focusing on multiple standards. The core base station is technology agnostic, and operators deploy different RadioBlades depending on they type of network they run or configuration they are trying to achieve. Nextel for instance, only used iDEN radio blades, but it could install Wi-Fi blades, GSM or CDMA blades alongside. "We built a very modular base station," Applegate said. "You restack the modules and you get a different type of base station."

Those restacking capabilities could have been a very key draw for Nextel, which is now in the middle of a merger waiting period with Sprint. Though no official announcement has been made as to whether the combined company would phase out iDEN, many in the industry suspect that iDEN may not be long for this world (see Telephony cover story), and Sprint appears fully committed to pursue EV-DO as its 3G migration path. RadioFrame's base stations not only could be converted to CDMA easily, it could run both iDEN and CDMA technologies simultaneously, allowing for a gradual migration to CDMA or maintaining both networks.