PureWave announces line of indoor small cells

PureWave Networks recently announced Constellation Lyra, a line of indoor small cells designed to provide LTE, W-CDMA and Wi-Fi coverage in indoor settings for enterprises—a solution that company officials believe would be ideal for the FirstNet deployment, as well.

While PureWave Networks has been providing outdoor small-cell solutions for years, the Constellation Lyra line represents the company’s first products designed for indoor use, according to Ronen Vengosh, vice president of marketing and business development for PureWave Networks.

“Our philosophy has always been that these small cells—regardless how small they get—still need to achieve macro parity, so large numbers of users are able to connect directly to the core, if they need to, and see all of the features that would be available with a macro cell,” Vengosh said during an interview with Urgent Communications.

“We always looked at the indoor market as attractive, but the silicon that was available previously for indoor-type applications was nowhere near powerful enough to get the macro-parity requirements that we had, and the user counts that we thought we required. So, we just sat out until the silicon caught up. Now that it’s here, we taking the platform where it needs to go.”

As it has with other small cells, PureWave Networks has collaborated with Texas Instruments on the development of Constellation Lyra, utilizing a TI system-on-chip technology, according to a PureWave press release.

One key feature of the Constellation Lyra portfolio is that it likely will be the first indoor solution to support LTE, W-CDMA and Wi-Fi in the same package, Vengosh said.

“In fact, the architecture is capable of handling two of each of these channels, so you can have two LTE channels and two WCDMA channels—conceivably in different bands, as well,” he said. “Nobody, to our knowledge, has done that.”

And that capability could be used to augment indoor coverage for the nationwide broadband network for first responders being built by FirstNet, Vengosh said. In fact, PureWave Networks has proposed a demonstration trial for FirstNet, he said.

“This is something we could sort of throw in for free. Let’s say you’re a Verizon customer, and you want Verizon coverage in your building or venue. We could do that and Band 14 FirstNet, with each one completely separate—separate management capabilities, separate bands and separate channels.

“That’s absolutely one of the things we intended the solution for.”