Canada's BelAir Networks rides iPhone wave

By Alastair Sharp

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's BelAir Networks is riding the mobile Internet wave into South Korea, India, Britain and Brazil, armed with WiFi and small cell products that are already deployed by the major North American wireless carriers that account for most of its revenue.

Founded in 2002, the venture capital-backed company turned its first profit a year ago and now has ambitious growth plans for European and Asian countries as its products undergo trials with major international telecoms carriers.

"We're growing quite nicely organically," BelAir founder and Chief Executive Bernard Herscovich told Reuters in an interview on Friday. "We see this mobile demand only growing."

The company leads the global market for providing WiFi capability to carriers, according to research firm Dell'Oro Group. Its main rival is networking giant Cisco.

BelAir has a particularly close relationship with AT&T. Herscovich said AT&T's long-exclusive carriage of Apple's bandwidth-hungry iPhone makes it a prototype for solutions other carriers must also seek.

BelAir's WiFi access points lessen the strain on AT&T's cellular network in Manhattan's Times Square as well as downtown areas of Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and six other U.S. cities.

The company expects to double that deployment by the end of the year, extending its reach to more than 20 cities. Herscovich said he sees a similar rate of growth with other customers, including cable companies Comcast and Time Warner Cable. What works in the United States should work elsewhere, he said.

"Our view is that if mobile carriers don't really leverage these small cell architectures and unlicensed spectrum (WiFi), data will end up crushing their networks," he said.