Perspectives

Abstract

by Stéphane Téral
February 24, 2025

Less than 8 months after exiting bankruptcy with $85.4M in new equity financing and access to an additional $20M undrawn line of credit, Airspan Networks Holdings LLC did not waste time grabbing some precious distressed distributed antenna systems (DAS) and indoor small cells assets.

Indeed, on February 20, 2025, Airspan announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Corning’s floundering wireless business, which accounted for just a drop in its Optical Communications business segment ocean. We knew that Corning had been looking for a suitor for some time because, on one hand, the July 2017 SpiderCloud acquisition, which was announced with great fanfare, failed to meet expectations, and on the other hand, the DAS business became very lumpy after its peak in 2015. Both Airspan and Corning are on the moon and the two long time leading DAS players—CommScope (see July 2024 Perspective) and Corning—are gone for good!

With its JMA XRAN virtualized software, JMA Wireless is the only remaining strong contender that Airspan, currently equipped with its cutting-edge vRAN OpenRANGE offering and augmenting it with the assets from this deal, will compete with.

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