Athena Wireless showcases tiny LTE small-cell solution with backhaul

Now that Pixie supports Band 14, public safety is a potential user, Tinoco said.

“Let’s say the fire department wants to have coverage in multiple locations, but they don’t want to spend a lot of money on base stations,” he said. “They could buy two or three of our Pixies, put them maybe 700 meters apart from each other, and the Pixie with the embedded backhaul will connect each of them back to our main fiber to connect to the packet core.”

At the heart of the Pixie is the millimeter-wave backhaul from Athena Wireless—a solution that also was on display as a separate package during IWCE 2014—and an LTE system-on-a-chip technology from Cavium Wireless, according to Athena Wireless COO Terry McManus.

“What we did was we took the technology from the LTE side, since we knew that every LTE solution needs backhaul, we said, ‘Why don’t we try to embed our backhaul into the LTE solution?’” McManus said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “So now, instead of having two boxes or two companies that you have to deal with, you would have one solution, and that single solution would come from Athena. So, we would provide the customer with an LTE solution that had our embedded backhaul.

“And, we’ve been able to do that in a very small package. So, our new LTE backhaul is about the size of a smoke detector that hangs on a wall.”

With the Pixie’s small size and built-in backhaul capability, deployment often can be executed much more quickly than in traditional cellular base-station installations. With all of its stated advantages, some customers have been wary of the Athena Wireless claims, Tinoco said.

“It’s a new way to do the technology,” Tinoco said. “So, right now we’re on the education part of it. We get a lot of, ‘Oh, I don’t believe it,’ until we send it over [for testing]. Then people say, ‘Now I believe it.’”