In a busy week, ORAN player Mavenir has announced its $100M IPO and its acquisition of Packet.io a UK-based small cells company. Packet.io’s business is built around supplying small cell solutions to CSPs and enterprise globally. Both events show the clear intent of Mavenir to become a strong alternate wireless solution provider and effectively compete agains mobile equipment incumbents.
Acquisition addresses two needs
In the recent analyst briefing Mavenir and Packet.io management outlined the rationale for the purchase. This was based around two key needs.
- 2G and 3G are not going away any time soon. Key Mavenir ORAN customers such as Vodafone want Open RAN but they also need to continue to support 2G and 3G networks. Packet.io gives Mavenir an ability to deliver 2G/3G backwards-compatibility for vRAN deployments
- Growth of private networks across multiple technologies and sectors. Packet.io brings strong credible private network technology and global deployments. It has long term partnership with leading industrial vertical partners to deliver high value solutions.
Removes an impediment to ORAN/vRAN adoption
Appledore believe that by addressing backwards-G compatibility, Mavenir is countering an important impediment to ORAN and vRAN adoption. Backwards-compatibility is an important driver for CSPs maintaining existing closed RAN vendors.
Credibility in private networks
In private networks, Mavenir will gain increased credibility for delivering credible enterprise solutions, based on real world deployment experience and business drivers. We believe this is critical to telco success beyond simply connectivity.
ORAN research
Appledore will be publishing research about the business opportunity and challenges for ORAN linked with our existing leading research on network automation. We will also be looking at the evolution of the private network market in future research.