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Vendors are racing into the public small cell market, coming from a range of backgrounds from consumer femtocells to conventional RAN gear. While there is much talk of the race for lamp posts for the tiny, low power base stations, much of the capacity they bring will actually be added indoors. That trend is targeted by SpiderCloud, a specialist in 'enterprise RAN' (E-RAN), which has added LTE to its system.

Its E-RAN offering can now support multimode combinations of 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi, providing cellcos with a platform for indoor enterprise and public access deployments. The start-up has been attracting big name support for its platform recently - it was effectively incubated by Vodafone, which has been trialling the technology, and it has a sales partnership with Japan's NEC, which is building its carrier RAN comeback attempt around 4G small cells.

SpiderCloud Wireless enables mobile operators to build very dense small cell networks to support coverage and capacity for corporations which are increasingly adopting mobile enterprise and cloud strategies. SpiderCloud says its E-RAN system consists of an SCSN (services node) that can control over 100 self-organizing, multi-access 3G, Wi-Fi and LTE small cells, which can be installed in days using an Ethernet Lan). One E-RAN can support over 10,000 connected smartphones and tablets, with just one connection to the operator's core, boasts the vendor, allowing for scalability for companies and public venues such as conference centers.

"As demand for mobile data capacity doubles every year, mobile operators need small cell system

flexibility as they transition to support both multiple mobile access technologies and enterprise

customers who increasingly rely on mobility for productivity," said Amit Jain, VP of product

management at SpiderCloud Wireless, in a statement. "Mobile operators can now control tens to hundreds of multimode 3G/Wi-Fi/LTE small cells with one touch point into the enterprise, without interference to other small cells or the macro cellular network."

The access points themselves support Power over Ethernet and have transmit power options from 100mW to 250mW. Options consist of the SCRN-200 with 16/32 channels and 3G small cell; the SCRN-300 with 16/32 3G channels and dual-radio Wi-Fi; and the SCRN-210 with 64 LTE channels supporting 2x2 MIMO. Operators can co-deploy the various nodes and manage them with a single SCSN, which makes all the cells appear as a single node to the evolved packet core (EPC) in LTE; and the 3G Iuh-standard gateway.

The SCSN acts as the local control point for the small cell enterprise network, handling functions like cell coordination and inter-small cell signaling (soft handover signaling for 3G and X2 signaling for LTE). This saves every small cell having to connect back to the cellco's gateways individually. The architecture also enables Local IP Access (LIPA), for local switching and local break-out, which is needed to ensure inter-small cell mobility, and localized services or content caching.

SpiderCloud says the SCSN manages interference between the E-RAN and the macro network and boosts data throughput and overall performance, handling over 100,000 data sessions and hand-offs per day. This eases mobile deployment of enterprise trends such as Wi-Fi as a service, BYOD, mobile device management, security and PBX integration, says the vendor.

The Services Node and the 3G and 3G/Wi-Fi small cells are available now and the LTE cell will ship in mid-2013.