- Airspan will have a lot to talk about when it lands in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2026
- The company is expanding into Europe with its MobileAccess Digital DAS platform
- The expansion follows thousands of U.S. deployments for carriers, venues and enterprises
With less than two weeks to go before Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, Airspan Networks is launching its MobileAccess Digital DAS platform across Europe and the United Kingdom.
Airspan believes this is an opportune time for expansion into Europe, according to Amit Jain, SVP and GM of In-Building Networks at Airspan, based in Plano, Texas.
To be sure, this isn’t an entirely new market for Airspan. Leading up to this digital DAS launch, Airspan has been doing deployments in Europe but primarily with small cells, Jain told Fierce.
“The small cell products were great to prove out the business case, but now we feel that people are ready to scale these deployments, and we feel we can do it better with this solution,” he said. “When we were doing it with small cells, they could only do private. But now with this solution, they can do both private and public network coverage in the same building.”
Airspan’s DAS supports all the public network frequency bands used by the carriers in Europe, as well as 3.7-4.2 GHz spectrum set up for private networks.
Private networks in Europe
One reason Europe is appealing is due to the type of spectrum being made available for private network deployments: It’s easier to deploy than the Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS) that is often used for private networks in the U.S., Jain said.
That’s because CBRS requires users to connect to a Spectrum Access System (SAS). In Europe, the process requires that a large enterprise (or other entity) apply to regulators for access to spectrum, and once it’s approved, they can use the spectrum without connecting to a SAS, he said.
Airspan got into its current small cell and DAS business in a kind of roundabout way. Last year, Airspan acquired Corning’s DAS and small cell business. Before that, Corning acquired SpiderCloud and its small cell business in 2017.
But Airspan isn’t using the SpiderCloud or Corning brands in its marketing; it’s moving to a more unified naming scheme – one that reflects Corning’s even earlier 2011 acquisition of one of the very early DAS companies: MobileAccess.
The MobileAccess Digital DAS line was introduced in the U.S. about four years ago, but Corning has been deploying DAS for about the last 15 years, Jain noted.
“So it’s quite widely deployed,” he said, in places such as hospitals, auto manufacturing plants and data centers.
Is open RAN dead?
One of the issues discussed at this year’s MWC is, once again, likely to be the state of open RAN, which isn’t exactly turning out the way early open RAN advocates had envisioned.
Broadly speaking, open RAN started out as a way to build mobile networks with disaggregated parts that aren’t controlled by a single vendor. The idea was to get away from reliance on the Ericssons and Nokias of the world and get more smaller vendors – and choices – into the mix, with the plan of mixing and matching radio and other units from various suppliers.
However, big vendors still dominate – including in open RAN – and few smaller vendors were able to keep their heads above water through it all. Airspan ran into some tough times a few years ago, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2024. But it went through a fairly fast restructuring and emerged with a stronger balance sheet and a new owner in Fortress Investment Group.
In January 2025, Airspan won a $42 million grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and it used those funds to develop an open RAN radio unit (RU) for Rakuten in Japan.
“Airspan remains a small cell provider at Rakuten and thanks to the NTIA grant, we are now able to supply them open RAN RUs as well,” Jain said.
Jain chose his words carefully when asked about the current state of open RAN.
“Progress is sometimes slower than you’d like it to be, but I think we’re moving in the right direction. At least we are quite excited about it,” he said.
Read next: What Fierce Network is watching for at MWC 2026: AI, 5G and network transformation