Dive Brief:
- Airspan Networks Holdings bought multiple fixed wireless product lines and hired more than 135 employees from Cambium Networks, which entered administration in the U.K. last week due to insolvency, the wireless technology provider said in an announcement Wednesday. Airspan did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.
- The Florida-based company purchased Cambium’s point-to-point and point-to-multipoint product lines, including the PTP 700 platform for defense applications and the high capacity PMP 450 platform. Airspan also acquired cloud network management systems cnMaestro, network design tool LinkPlanner and wireless modeling application cnHeat.
- Airspan will invest in Cambium's supply chain and provide support for the acquisitions. “We are financially a very strong company, which allows us to drive the supply chain and deliver products to our customers, and this has been a little bit of a struggle in the past over the last year or so for the customers,” Airspan SVP and GM of In-Building Networks Amit Jain told Channel Dive.
Dive Insight:
Cambium's financial woes triggered questions from partners and customers about how the company's technology portfolio would be managed. Airspan’s investment provided answers for several core products.
Amid speculation that cnMaestro would be permanently shuttered, users running Cambium products in the cloud considered migrating on-premises management. Through Airspan’s acquisition, the cnMaestro platform will stay alive.
“We are not buying the entire portfolio that Cambium had, but for everything that we are buying, we'll continue to support the cloud-based cnMaestro, so any of the customers of these product lines should see no disruption at all,” Jain said.
The acquisitions complement Airspan's existing business with enterprise critical communications and defense sectors. The wireless company’s customers include airports, such as the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, stadiums, manufacturing plants and data centers, Jain said. Some internet service providers — which are a key customer segment for Cambium — already use Airspan products, but Jain said Airspan is not targeting them with this acquisition.
For that reason, Cambium’s ISP-focused ePMP line was not part of the deal.
“We are very happy to have the ISP customers, and we'll continue to support them,” Jain said. “And we'd of course like to bring them new Airspan products.”
Cambium’s administrators might have to look longer for a buyer for ePMP, J2 Consulting Owner and Founder Justin Wilson told Channel Dive last week. The product’s low price point was revolutionary for many ISPs when it launched in 2013, but any acquirer “is going to have to figure out how to make money off of a product that's already deployed,” Wilson said.
The fixed wireless broadband platform is promising for regions where communications infrastructure is still modernizing, Wilson added.
“It's fairly cheap to deploy; You can run it on a car battery,” Wilson said. “If someone picks up the ePMP line, the focus is, ‘Hey, how do we push this into the jungles of South Africa or the mountains of Brazil?”
Jain said Airspan wants to reassure Cambium customers that it will continue to invest in its purchases.
“I think they're going through a difficult time,” Jain said. “Nobody wants to be in a situation where they've invested in a platform and it runs into this kind of challenge. Our focus is to make sure that for the part of Cambium that we are taking on, we do our best, and customers see that.”
