Techies like comics so we’ll call it SpiderCloud – Sprint

You can almost imagine a couple of marketing executives congratulating themselves with a kale smoothie as they came with this idea to market small cells to enterprise customers.

It’s an out there idea which combines two seemingly important points; firstly, the small cell product from Sprint can ‘stick’ onto any Cisco WiFi infrastructure, and secondly, the target market is the IT crowd, who stereotypically like comic books. The result is SpiderCloud – well done guys, reward yourselves with a flannel shirt and a new pair of jeggings.

What next you ask? BatMEC, lurking in the shadows to cache your data. Thor’s hammer of 5G, crushing your data requirements. Captain Rural America, leading the charge against the evil not-spots hiding in the barn.

Or how about SuperNFV – is it a bird, is it a plane, no it’s a network architecture concept that uses the technologies of IT virtualization to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create communication services.

“This innovative LTE small cell literally clips onto existing Cisco WiFi infrastructure and can be deployed in less than 30 minutes, providing a very cost-effective way to rapidly improve indoor service,” said Robert Kingsley, Director of Small Cell and WiFi Development at Sprint. “We’re excited to keep expanding our toolbox of small cell solutions with this latest innovation for the enterprise.”

All joking aside, it isn’t the worst idea in the world (well, the name is shockingly awful). An enterprise can deploy SpiderCloud LTE Radio Nodes (RN) on its Ethernet LAN. The RNs connect to SpiderCloud’s Services Node (SN), located on the enterprise LAN. Sprint then claims a network of 100 Radio Nodes and 1 Services Node can provide over a gigabit of capacity and coverage across a public venue or office as large as 1.5 million square feet.

Right now SpiderCloud LTE Radio Nodes support Sprint’s 1.9 GHz spectrum band, with plans to extend support for Sprint’s 2.5 GHz band is in mid-2018. Let’s just hope this doesn’t clash with ComiCon or Sprint will be well and truly screwed.

UPDATE: Disclaimer for the fun police SpiderCloud is also the name of one of Sprint’s suppliers. This does not mean Sprint would have to name the solution after the product, therefore we prefer our take on the situation.