Small cell innovator and market leader, ip.access, today confirmed it had closed a new round of funding, raising some $15m from its current investors and from a major new backer.

The company's existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Cisco, Intel Capital, Qualcomm, Rothschild & Cie Gestion, Scottish Equity Partners and TE Connectivity all participated in the funding and re-affirmed their commitment to the small cell market.

CEO Simon Brown confirmed the capital raised will be used to continue the acceleration of the company's small cell product development roadmap and deployment activities.

"We are delighted with this show of support from our investor partners," said Brown. "The small cell market has enormous growth potential - especially through the roll-out of high speed 3G and LTE networks with their dependency on small cell-architectures to supply the necessary network capacity.

"With our expertise in large scale femtocell deployments - recently passing the market-leading half-million deployed milestone - we are in a great position to capitalise on the growing market demand for small cells. We fundamentally understand both the economic and the network planning requirements of small cell systems."

The company has recently outlined its vision for femtocells and picocells in private and public consumer, small office and enterprise applications, and is actively expanding its product portfolio to give operators the widest possible choice of small cell solutions.

In addition, to further smooth the introduction of public small cell networks, ip.access recently announced nanoConverge, an enhancement to its femto Access Controller and network management systems which allows operators to support 2G, 3G and in future 4G small cells on a common back-end platform, further extending the life of their current infrastructure investments.

Brown added: "Everything we are doing and developing at the moment is geared towards making it easier and more cost effective for operators to add coverage and capacity to their networks where it is needed most - in homes, in offices and in busy public locations. No other vendor has as much experience of delivering this additional resource, or as complete a portfolio of solutions, as ip.access."

About ip.access

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, ip.access Ltd ( www.ipaccess.com ) is an innovator, developer and manufacturer of small cell infrastructure solutions for home, business, or public use and is an acknowledged world-leader across a number of key measures.

The company's range of 'Small Cell' picocell and femtocell solutions for 3G, EDGE GSM, and forthcoming LTE deployments combine IP and wireless technologies and have all the key components needed - small cell access points, converged radio access gateways, and network management solutions - to help operators drive down costs and increase the coverage and capacity of mobile networks.

In 2011, ip.access passed the market-leading milestone of 500,000 3G small cells deployed and has also been independently ranked by ABI Research as the world's number 1 picocell vendor.

ip.access is the company behind the multi-award winning Oyster 3G(TM) femtocell technology, which dramatically improves indoor 3G coverage and overall network capacity. Oyster 3G is the core femtocell technology 'inside' AT&T's 3G MicroCell - the world's largest consumer small cell deployment.

The company's nanoGSM(R) and nano3G(R)picocell solutions provide 2G and 3G coverage and capacity for offices, shops, stations, remote rural areas and even passenger aircraft and ships, with live installations in more than 60 networks around the world.

ip.access counts Scottish Equity Partners, Rothschild, Intel Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, Tyco Electronics, Cisco, Qualcomm and Motorola Ventures among its shareholders.