Investors back ip.access with further $15m boost

UK: Cambridge based small cell innovator and market leader, ipaccess confirmed it had closed a new round of funding, raising some $15m from its current investors and from a major new backer.

The company’s existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Cisco, Intel Capital, Qualcomm, Rothschild & Cie Gestion, Scottish Equity Partners and TE Connectivity all participated in the funding and re-affirmed their commitment to the small cell market.

CEO Simon Brown confirmed the capital raised will be used to continue the acceleration of the company’s small cell product development roadmap and deployment activities.

“We are delighted with this show of support from our investor partners,” said Brown. “The small cell market has enormous growth potential – especially through the roll-out of high speed 3G and LTE networks with their dependency on small cell- architectures to supply the necessary network capacity.

“With our expertise in large scale femtocell deployments – recently passing the market-leading half-million deployed milestone – we are in a great position to capitalise on the growing market demand for small cells. We fundamentally understand both the economic and the network planning requirements of small cell systems.”

The company has recently outlined its vision for femtocells and picocells in private and public consumer, small office and enterprise applications, and is actively expanding its product portfolio to give operators the widest possible choice of small cell solutions.

In addition, to further smooth the introduction of public small cell networks, ip.access recently announced nanoConverge, an enhancement to its femto Access Controller and network management systems which allows operators to support 2G, 3G and in future 4G small cells on a common back-end platform, further extending the life of their current infrastructure investments.

Brown added: “Everything we are doing and developing at the moment is geared towards making it easier and more cost effective for operators to add coverage and capacity to their networks where it is needed most – in homes, in offices and in busy public locations. No other vendor has as much experience of delivering this additional resource, or as complete a portfolio of solutions, as ip.access.”