ip.access Limited is a multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and markets small cells (picocell and femtocell) technologies and infrastructure equipment for GSM, GPRS, EDGE, 3G, 4G and 5G. The company was acquired by Mavenir in September 2020.
The company’s headquarters is based in Cambourne, England. The company also maintains offices in Gurgaon and Pune, India.
ip.access combines IP and cellular technologies to provide 2G, 3G and LTE coverage and for mobile networks. Using satellite backhaul, its products provide coverage to commercial passenger aircraft, ships, and users in remote rural areas.
The firm is a member of 3GPP, CBRS Alliance, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Having previously been an individual member of the Telecom Infra Project, following its acquisition, ip.access continues to be involved through Mavenir's membership.
History
ip.access was founded in December 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary of TTP Group PLC aimed at developing technologies that would allow multiple radio access technologies to communicate over the Internet. To accommodate its growing staff, in 2006 ip.access relocated to new offices in Cambourne Business Park, Cambridge, where it remains.
In October 2000, TTP Group spun off its communications division (TTP Communications, or TTPCom) in an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange, and ip.access joined the spin-off as a wholly owned subsidiary of the TTPCom group.
In March 2006, the company secured an £8.5 million round of funding from Intel Capital, Scottish Equity Partners, and Rothschild & Cie Banque. As part of its June 2006 acquisition of TTP Communications, Motorola also gained a stake in ip.access. In 2007, after signing an OEM agreement with ip.access, ADC (now part of Tyco Electronics) made a minority interest investment in the company. Followed by, both Cisco Systems and Qualcomm making strategic financial investments in the company in 2008.
In July 2007, the firm became a founding member of the Femto Forum, renamed Small Cell Forum in February 2012. ip.access was named in The Sunday Times Fast Tech Track 100 in both 2007 and 2008. The company was also cited as the number one picocell vendor by global market intelligence company, ABI Research in 2008.
In 2009, ip.access was named in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA. In April 2009, the company announced its Oyster 3G product would support femtocell standards published by 3GPP and the Broadband Forum. In March 2010, the company took part in the first Plugfest, organized by ETSI as part of its Plugtests program, held to demonstrate the effectiveness of the 3GPP femtocell standards in supporting interoperability between femtocell access points and network equipment from different vendors.
In June 2011, the market research and analysis firm Infonetics named ip.access along with its partner Cisco Systems, as the leading supplier of 3G femtocells. In August 2011, ip.access announced it had made more than 500,000 installations of its 3G technologies. In February 2013, ip.access announced it had become the first 3G small cell provider to ship one million residential units. In the same month, ip.access and completed successful interoperability testing of 3G small cells over IP Satellite.
In February 2014, ip.access launched a new range of small cells called presenceCell, which unlike traditional small cells, do not rely on providing indoor coverage and capacity to deliver a return on investment. Rather, the ultra-compact base stations are designed to capture anonymous user location and phone identity information from smartphones, which can be analysed and packaged as a service for a variety of businesses.
Private equity fund Zouk Capital invested in ip.access in July 2015 alongside Amadeus Capital Partners.
In August 2015, ip.access was named as a partner in the European Commission-funded €8 million Horizon 2020 Project SESAME. Led by Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation (OTE) the project's remit was to develop virtualised cloud-enabled, multi-operator, 5G radio access infrastructure and services. In February, 2016. ip.access launched its Viper platform to provide end-to-end connectivity and management for small cells.