Cisco announced what it calls a small cell wireless backhaul ecosystem that enlists a number of industry partners, including BLiNQ, DragonWave, Fastback Networks, NEC, Radwin and Siklu.
"We are announcing an ecosystem of wireless backhaul partners that have been tested with our end-to-end solution and can deliver the right solution for wireless backhaul to meet any carrier need--line-of-sight (LOS), non line-of-sight, point to point or point to multipoint," said Partho Mishra, vice president and general manager of Cisco's small cell technology group, on the company blog.
Cisco has numerous small cell-related efforts in play. In February, the vendor announced its ASR 901S router, which is designed to enable wide-scale deployment of outdoor small cells.
AT&T has already deployed 1 million of Cisco's residential femtocells, and the vendor has expanded its small cell capabilities via more than $1.5 billion in acquisitions it has recently made in the mobile arena, which have become part of its Quantum Suite of offerings.
Cisco paid $475 million for Intucell, which specializes in self-optimizing network (SON) software for radio access network (RAN) and small cell integration; an undisclosed amount for BroadHop, which provides more than 70 policy installations at service providers around the world; an undisclosed amount for ThinkSmart, provider of location intelligence and analytics; and $1.2 billion for Wi-Fi and cloud networking vendor Meraki.
For more:
- see this Cisco blog entry
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