Airspan Networks Holdings has come to the rescue of Cambium Networks, the financially troubled wireless tech provider that recently laid off more than half of its employees.
Airspan today announced it has acquired the bulk of Cambium’s fixed wireless product lines that serve a mix of wireless broadband service providers and defense and critical communications customers. As a result, more than 135 Cambium employees are joining Airspan.
‘Material revenue driver’ for Airspan
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. However, Airspan expects the agreement to enable it to broaden its global business and enter into new segments, including providing wireless technologies and systems to the defense industry.
“We’re continuing to grow, and I would expect that the Cambium acquisition is going to be a material revenue driver on that now-combined company going forward,” Airspan CEO Glenn Laxdal told Light Reading.
Laxdal said Fortress Investment Group-backed Airspan will shed more light on the financial upside that’s expected from the transaction. In the first half of 2026, Airspan posted revenues of $70 million, up 112% year-over-year. At the end of Q2 2026, Airspan posted revenues of more than $152 million and $25 million in earnings over the prior 12-month period.
Cambium was mired in financial trouble
The transaction comes together more than a week after Cambium disclosed that its cash had run dry, had started the bankruptcy restructuring process and had laid off 260 employees, or 53.6% of its total workforce – all without severance payments. At the time, Cambium also noted that its administrators were attempting to sell the company’s assets.
Those disclosures arrived nearly three months after Cambium announced its stock was delisted on the Nasdaq following multiple delinquency notices. Its efforts to appeal the decision failed as shares shifted to trading on the OTC market. In a May 2026 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Cambium warned that “[t]here is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.”
Laxdal said talks with Cambium preceded the company’s most recent filing by several months. “We’ve had a long engagement with Cambium,” he explained.
What Airspan is getting
Airspan is acquiring an array of Cambium products, including the PMP 450 point-to-point access platform, PTP 670 unlicensed point-to-point backhaul platform, PTP 700 point-to-point systems tailored for defense applications, and the cnWave millimeter wave point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connectivity platform. Airspan is also taking over management system and planning software products such as the LINKPlanner (network design), cnHeat (wireless modeling) and cnMaestro (wireless network management).
Laxdal noted that Cambium will provide a greater focus on transport and complement Airspan’s focus on the access.
“From our perspective, this is very much hand and glove. They’ve got what we don’t have; we have what they don’t have,” he said, noting that the companies both have employees in the US, UK and India. “We now have a transport connection into our 5G wireless private networks and 5G public networks.”
Bullish on critical infrastructure and defense industry support
From the customer side, there’s little overlap between the two companies, Laxdal said. Cambium, he notes, brings in an array of broadband service provider customers, complementing Airspan’s work with major mobile network operators such as AT&T, Rakuten, Reliance Jio and Verizon.
Laxdal said the move will also expand Airspan’s focus on products and services for critical infrastructure while providing an established path into the defense technology arena. Of those two, Airspan sees defense as the potentially largest growth opportunity to pursue via the Cambium agreement.
“We are onboarding a very large, substantial defense industry presence with this acquisition,” he said. “We’ve talked about it [the defense sector] and represented our intention to get into that space. But it’s not for the faint of heart. It takes a long time to break into the defense space. Now we have the opportunity with a large revenue stream coming into us from defense that allows us to start investing in a [defense] portfolio.”
Laxdal expects it will take about six months to complete the full integration, including the integration of customer bases, support organizations and supply chains – roughly the same amount of time it took for Airspan to integrate its Q1 2025 acquisition of Corning’s wireless business. Airspan has set a 30/60/90 day plan for the initial phases of the Cambium integration, he said.
