Airspan buys Cambium's wireless lines — and 135 people

Airspan Network Holdings has taken the fixed wireless product lines of Cambium Networks' UK subsidiary out of administration, picking up more than 135 Cambium employees in the process — sales and support staff in the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa, and research and development teams in the US, the UK and India. Data Center Dynamics reported the acquisition, and Airspan did not disclose what it paid.

What it bought is unusually specific: Cambium's point-to-multipoint access lines, unlicensed point-to-point backhaul, point-to-point systems for defense applications, millimeter wave gear in point-to-point and point-to-multipoint forms, narrowband communications built for industrial environments, and the management and planning software that ties the equipment together. Cambium Networks Ltd, the wholly owned UK subsidiary of Cambium Networks Corporation, supplies fixed wireless access, WiFi, switching and cloud management to enterprises and internet service providers, and it entered administration earlier this month. A banner on its website states that its affairs are now in the hands of four RSM partners: David Shambrook, Gordon Thomson, James Woodhead and Joe Barry.

What Airspan bought was product lines; the company itself stayed behind, and Cambium Networks Ltd remains in administration, which normally leaves the estate and its claims with the RSM appointees. The coverage does not say whether the WiFi, switching and cloud management lines were included, or what becomes of them if they were not. Distressed purchases rarely arrive with clean edges, and the undisclosed price is the less interesting omission.

A fixed wireless business sits at an awkward spot in the digital infrastructure stack because point-to-multipoint access and millimeter wave links carry traffic that would otherwise ride fiber or licensed spectrum, and they are sold to ISPs and enterprises on economics that turn on deployment speed rather than on the long-dated contracts that underwrite a conduit build. Products like these come loose when the balance sheet behind them gives way, and the buyer is typically a specialist for whom the line is closer to a core business than it was to the seller.

Airspan has done this before; chief executive Glenn Laxdal cited the company's integration of the wireless businesses it bought from Corning and Jabil as evidence that it can absorb teams and product lines and keep customers supplied, and he said the same focus would apply here, with Cambium's point-to-point and point-to-multipoint products as a compelling addition to Airspan's 4G and 5G offerings for service providers, defense and critical communications.

What changed hands is an installed base rather than contracted cash flow: products already deployed with defense, industrial and service provider customers, none of which carries the anchor contract that earns infrastructure pricing in digital infrastructure. Cambium is what the far end of that hierarchy looks like, a business with real products and real customers that did not change hands in a negotiated sale but resolved through an administration with its parts sold line by line.

Our reporting on Macquarie's sale of Polish fiber to fund a data center push covered the same mechanism at a healthier end of the market: assets that get sold to pay for the next build, with buyers tending to be the operators for whom the asset is core rather than peripheral.

Some of what Airspan bought is more durable than the rest: point-to-point links sold into defense applications and narrowband equipment for industrial sites are the least cyclical revenue in the portfolio and the portion least exposed to a service provider's capital budget, while point-to-multipoint access and millimeter wave backhaul for ISPs move with a carrier's spending plans, the sort of revenue that tends to be valued at a discount when it stands alone.

Buying capability through an administration is the right call for these lines because sales and support coverage across four regions and R&D in three countries cannot be assembled by hiring at any predictable pace, and an administration is the rare mechanism that makes an intact team available in a single transaction, with the product catalog as what comes along with it.

Laxdal's stated commitment to supporting the customers and partners who invested in these products is the promise that now has to be kept, and it carries more weight than it would in an ordinary acquisition because those customers bought from a supplier that no longer controls its own affairs. Continuity is what Airspan is selling to the installed base while it works out what to build on top of it.

If Airspan paid a multiple befitting contracted cash flow for lines that carry no anchor contract, the deal only works if the people and the installed base create one. The undisclosed terms point to a modest consideration, and that is the only reading on offer when a buyer says nothing about price while describing the assets at length. Judged as a capability purchase, the trade makes sense at the unglamorous end of the market, where price is set by what the business is worth to the buyer that can use it.

The number to hold Airspan to is the one it did disclose: more than 135 employees, in sales and support across four regions and R&D across three countries. Whether they are still on the roster the next time a wireless business with customers and no anchor contract reaches administration will say more about this roll-up than the price ever would.