Airspan is selling its Mimosa Networks to Radisys, a wholly owned subsidiary of Jio Platforms, for $60 million.
Airspan acquired Mimosa in 2018 to target cost-effective, fixed wireless access (FWA) connections. Mimosa has a diverse portfolio of point-to-point and point-to-multi-point products based on Wi-Fi 5 and the newer Wi-Fi 6E technologies. The company says its Mimosa solutions have use cases in the backhaul requirements for 5G and FWA rollouts.
Airspan said yesterday that Jio has been a major customer of Mimosa. This makes sense based on Jio’s activity in the past several months.
In September 2022, Jio announced a new FWA service — Jio AirFiber. Jio said AirFiber would be connected to Jio’s 5G network via a device that would act as a Wi-Fi hotspot, providing fiber-like speeds. Jio also set a goal to ultimately connect 100 million locations with its FWA. This would be transformational in a country that historically has not had a strong fixed broadband offering with high-speed internet connectivity for homes and businesses.
Also in September 2022, Fierce Wireless had a short LinkedIn conversation with Jio Senior VP Aayush Bhatnagar who talked a little about Jio’s FWA strategy. Bhatnager said, “FWA actually has higher gain and improves the cell throughput and performance.” He said for Jio’s network the FWA device will be installed on the windows of homes and businesses. “FWA is an outdoor device, so it leads to better uplink gain, due to 4 receive chains, leading to better cell throughput as less PRBs [physical resource blocks] are used.”
In 2017, Mimosa talked about its proprietary Spectrum Reuse Synchronization (SRS) technology for FWA.
SRS allows a single access point to efficiently reuse channels rather than wasting spectrum to avoid interference.
In yesterday’s announcement, Jio President Mathew Oommen stated, “Over the years, our collaboration with Airspan has resulted in groundbreaking architectures for high-speed connectivity for both the end user and for backhaul applications.”
Airspan CEO Eric Stonestrom said the transaction with Jio “strengthens Airspan’s balance sheet, enabling the company to pursue 4G and 5G private and MNO networks, which have been our main focus.”
Jio is a shareholder of Airspan and maintains a seat on its board of directors.
The sale of Mimosa is expected to close in the third quarter of 2023. Mimosa’s product development, manufacturing, and sales teams of 56 employees will continue with Mimosa following the acquisition.
Airspan maintains a reseller channel for specific joint 4G/5G and FWA projects and will continue marketing Mimosa products to some of its customers following the acquisition.