More mobile misery at Cisco: Intucell set for cuts?

A week after Channel Register heard of Cisco's woes in the small cell business, reports are emerging that another recent acquisition is also troubled.

On the back of last week's report that half the staff of Ubiquisys's Swindon operation might be de-assimilated, Lightreading reckoned there were now nervous flutters in The Borg's Intucell acquisition.

Intuicell's pitch was that its SON (self-optimising network) technology trawled mobile base station traffic data, and by analysing this, it could adjust parameters like cell size to cope with changes in traffic patterns.

Lightreading claimed that Cisco will wrap a number of business units into a new Radio Access Network (RAN) division.

As well as the small cell business it bought when it acquired Ubiquisys for $310m, the RAN business would absorb the $475m Intuicell operation.

Lightreading noted that even though The Borg has its own small cell products, at Mobile World Congress it announced it would resell similar kit from SpiderCloud under its USC 8,000 product line. At that time, it also announced a major deployment with Vodafone.

Pulling Spidercloud into its product line supports Channel Register's original information, that Ubiquisys hadn't made the transition from start-up mode “to an operational model”.

Earlier this month, Cisco promised to spray around a billion dollars – £645m – in the UK.

While that strategy was welcomed by Blighty Prime Minister David Cameron, the reverse-embiggening of Ubuquisys would put a scratch on the rose-coloured glasses. Investors and inventors would get a payoff, but what's the national benefit if, having acquired a company's intellectual property, the R&D gets repatriated to California?

The Register has asked Cisco to comment. ®