ALAMEDA, Calif. – Sep. 26, 2012 – Wind River®, a world leader in embedded and mobile software, announced that Ubee-AirWalk is using VxWorks® in its latest enterprise-grade CDMA femtocell. Branded as the Sprint AIRAVE Pro Connect, it is currently a part of Sprint’s in-building solutions product portfolio.
Ubee-AirWalk is a leader in small cell technology, with a portfolio including femtocells, picocells and metrocells. Small cells are compact wireless base stations that expand and enhance network service in high-usage areas. Picocells and metrocells are typically deployed in public areas to fill in coverage gaps unreachable by the existing macro infrastructure. Residential and enterprise femtocells are well-suited as in-building solutions to bring stronger cellular coverage into the home or office.
The AIRAVE Pro Connect enterprise femtocells improve cellular reception and increase coverage and capacity at enterprises, campuses, government buildings and other public venues using a broadband connection. The AIRAVE Pro Connect allows Sprint to expand voice and data service to new venues and enhance coverage with existing customers with a cost-effective, in-building solution. To address the challenges of increasing mobile traffic and high expectations for user experience and uninterrupted connectivity, Ubee-AirWalk needed to meet hard real-time processing requirements to develop a product that could reliably offload heavy voice and data usage from the macro cellular network to a corporate network. VxWorks is the market leading and de facto real-time operating system (RTOS) for the embedded industry, and has real-time attributes, security capabilities and a rich network stack that were key factors in Ubee-AirWalk’s selection of VxWorks.
“Enterprise femtocells assist our customers in reducing costs, speeding deployments and offloading voice and data usage from the macro network. In order to develop cost-effective and reliable small cells, it was necessary to find technologies that met our requirements such as capabilities for low latency, high configurability for security and smooth integration with our silicon preferences,” said Chris Osborn, chief technology officer at Ubee-AirWalk. “VxWorks was a clear choice for our enterprise femtocell as it is the most widely used and proven RTOS throughout the industry. We’ve long worked with Wind River and keep returning as they continually deliver on our technology needs as well as provide outstanding support at each step.”
“The ever increasing volume of data traffic on wireless networks and resulting network congestion put operators under pressure to further expand coverage and maintain subscriber service quality levels,” said Mike Langlois, general manager for networking at Wind River. “By relying on Wind River, Ubee-AirWalk is able to develop networking products that tackle coverage and system capacity issues that are top of mind with operators.”
About Wind River
Wind River, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), is a world leader in embedded and mobile software. Wind River has been pioneering computing inside embedded devices since 1981, and its technology is found in more than 1 billion products. Wind River is headquartered in Alameda, Calif., with offices in more than 20 countries. To learn more, visit Wind River at www.windriver.com or on Facebook.
