Airspan Networks Inc (fka AIRO)

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New Airspan Product Could Be a 'Base Hit' in Canadian Smart Grid Market
http://smart-grid.tmcnet.com/topics/smart-grid/articles/174456-new-airspan-product-could-be-base-hit-canadian.htm

By Cheryl Kaften
TMCnet Contributor

A new base station from Airspan Networks (News - Alert), Inc., a U.S.-based provider of carrier-class broadband wireless solutions, is targeted directly at the Canadian Smart Grid market.

On May 11 at the UTC Telecom 2011 industry meeting in Long Beach, California, Airspan introduced Air4G for the 1.8 GHz frequency band—which is set aside by Industry Canada for electric power applications.

Air4G supports the fourth generation of cellular wire standards, with both 4G WiMAX and 4G LTE radio interfaces in an extremely compact, all-in-one base station, allowing utilities to minimize operational expenses while maximizing capacity and range.

The support for dual-mode WiMAX (News - Alert) and LTE operation enables utilities planning to transition their networks to LTE to move at their own pace. With a compact, ruggedized all-outdoor design, Air4G is designed for quick, easy, and affordable deployment .

Airspan describes this product line as “an ideal platform for utility applications in difficult deployment areas,” because it combines powerful 2 x10W transmitters and four receiver chains, delivering up to fourth order diversity on the downlink and eighth order diversity on the uplink. This enables the product to support a range of Smart Grid applications, such as direct-to-the-meter AMI(Advanced Metering Infrastructure), AMI backhaul, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), teleprotection, and distribution automation.

In addition to the Air4G 1.8 GHz base station, the company has introduced a variety of WiMAX 1.8 GHz end-user devices— including the MiMAX-Pro outdoor CPE (customer premises equipment); the MRT, a hardened mobile radio terminal designed for vehicle mounting; and an advanced 802.16e embedded multi-band module.

“One of Airspan's differentiating strengths is the wide variety of bands our equipment operates in,” said Amit Ancikovsky, president of Products and Sales for Airspan. “The addition of the 1.8 GHz band allows us to target a range of new customers in places like Canada. Canadian utilities will now be able to incorporate direct-to-meter connectivity currently being used with the Air4G base stations in other bands, such as 2.3 GHz in Australia.”

Air4G operates in frequency bands ranging from 700 MHz up to 3.8 GHz, and supports both FDD (frequency-division duplexing) and TDD (time-division duplexing).