Viper allows in-building cellular infrastructure to be deployed “as easily as Wi-Fi,” states the company. It is a virtualised, in-premises enterprise radio access network platform integrating ip.access’ 3G and 4G access points, and virtualised access control gateways and small cells as a service (ScaaS) offerings into an end-to-end solution to address enterprise customer needs. Security, automated provisioning and network configuration are an integral part of the Viper platform, with access points requiring only Ethernet and mains power connections.
“We see small enterprises as a key market for this technology,” said Malcolm Gordon, CEO, ip.access. “Over 95 per cent of businesses have fewer than 100 employees, and many of them are located in office buildings with poor mobile coverage. The Viper platform allows everyone to get five-bar 3G and 4G coverage anywhere in their premises as easily as deploying enterprise Wi-Fi. With more than 80 per cent of mobile data being consumed indoors, in-building cellular coverage is becoming a must-have.”
“Many enterprises are getting desperate for improved mobile coverage and are ready to buy their own infrastructure,” said Joe Madden, principal analyst at Mobile Experts. “Landlords often have difficulty renting space with poor mobile coverage, and hotels can lose customers if mobile services are weak.”
The Viper platform can be deployed by mobile network operators, independent service companies and large enterprises with a variety of business models including ScaaS. ip.access has more than 1.8 million small cells deployed by over 150 customers worldwide and as a result developed and proved extensive self-organising network (SON) features which enable ‘plug and play’ installation of small cell access points.
This allows service partners and large enterprise customers to “easily rollout new sites without burdening the network operator, with the Viper platform taking care of new cell provisioning,” state ip.access. Viper also features the company’s SUMO multi-operator capability, enabling one small cell access point to provide in-building coverage for all mobile phone networks, minimising costs, footprint and disruption.
Viper incorporates a variety of small cell access points which ip.access says is suitable for large enterprise, small enterprise and SoHo (Small Office/Home Office) users. It adds that Viper Access Points support a wide range of worldwide frequency bands and spectrum access methods, including traditional licensed operation, Citizen’s Broadband and Licensed Shared Access.
The fully virtualised 3G and 4G Access Controller gateways in Viper provide industry standard interfaces to the operator’s core network and Operations Support System (OSS), and can be cloud hosted, or deployed on dedicated server hardware.
The new platform also provides per-operator reporting of voice and data traffic, enabling a variety of business models for shared multi-operator RAN. It simplifies small cell rollouts by providing a single, scalable interface to the mobile operator’s core network, and offloads all small-cell specific signalling to the Viper gateway. All small cell provisioning, configuration management, KPI reporting, and fault/alarm monitoring are performed as a fully managed service.
The Viper platform is available now from ip.access and through selected service partners worldwide.
