Enterprise Wireless Launch celonawhich two years ago launched radio and software products to support private use of mobile networks, on Tuesday announced a new set of radios and software to support four different licensed spectrum bands in markets around the world — what it calls an integrated 5G local area network or a “NR” 5G LAN product suite.
New products will play an important role in what the company calls an “untapped enterprise,” places such as relatively unconnected manufacturing facilities.
“Over the past 9 to 12 months, we’ve seen a really tangible need in manufacturing, warehouses, oilfields – places where the concept of digitization is no longer what we’re used to.” , said Rajeev Shah, co-founder and CEO of Celona. an interview with ZDNET via Zoom. “Those are the places where both Wi-Fi and public cellular have traditionally struggled. That’s where we see the most demand.”
Even entire cities can be covered by a “private” cellular network.
The company introduced the city of Glendale, Arizona as its first customer. Glendale is appropriate because it has many use cases, with an emphasis on outdoor spaces. “The idea of a large outdoor space in a city is an extreme version” of many industries that are not carpeted, he said.
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The offering includes six new hardware radio products, access points; flight attendant software called Celona Converged Edge, a “controller” service that complies with the global O-RAN standard; and the company’s management console, the cloud-based Celona Orchestrator.
The radio is based on the “New Radio” 5G specification released by industry standards organization Project 3rd Generation Partners, or 3GPP. Devices that support quad-band for 5G use are being rolled out in markets around the world.
Those spectral bands are n48, using the 3,550 to 3,700 MHz band in the United States; n78, using 3,300 to 3,800 MHz and n77, 3,800 to 4,200 MHz, in Europe and the UK; and by the end of this year, the n79 band is at 4,400 to 5,000 MHz in Japan, Korea and other countries.
Celona’s 5G radios are engineered to meet NR specifications with three times the total throughput of existing 4G LTE radios, halving latency, and doubling reach and user capacity. use. In practice, that means uplink and downlink speeds of up to a billion bits per second, or 1 Gbps, and round-trip latency of less than 10 milliseconds.
As an integrated radio, the new device allows customers to run 4G LTE mobile networks and then enable 5G when they are ready to do so. More technical details are available in the Celona FAQ.
The products were announced during Mobile World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona, Spain, one of the world’s largest conferences for the international telecommunications community.
Celona has touted itself as an alternative to the traditional telecommunications equipment market consisting of Nokia, Cisco and others. While improving the company’s wireless LAN, Celona’s technology aims to meet the premise of private cellular networks, namely more selective network control, in the same way that a service provider can structure its wide area network to ensure quality of service.
Shah thinks the price and complexity of 5G wireless equipment is an obstacle. “One energy customer told us it took a year just to roll out the wireless in two locations,” he recalls. “The issue is the level of professional services required to incorporate the network.”
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Celona’s selling point is that by starting from scratch as a business-friendly software platform, the company’s equipment avoids such complexity.
Mr. Shah said Celona doesn’t aim to be “a low-cost leader”, but “we are usually much lower, sometimes less than half the price Nokia is charging”. “They’re too expensive – some customers tell us they can’t even start with that kind of price.”
“What we’ve seen over the past twelve months, what we’ve found, as we review our significant business commitments, it’s really up to us and Nokia,” Shah said. idea.
Celona’s license plans start at $17,000 for a three-year subscription for indoor use, with no limit on the number of users per access point. An access point radio can typically support 100 users at speeds between 300 and 400 Mbps.
So far, Celona customers have used the company’s equipment as an enterprise 4G LTE private radio network, with the hope of one day adding 5G. Currently, less than 5% of Celona’s customers use 5G.
“Some customers are perfectly fine going with 4G, some of them say they need 5G for applications like machine vision and industrial protocols that require low latency,” Shah said.
“Remember, 99% of businesses today don’t have their own cellular network, so the status quo is usually Wi-Fi,” says Shah. “So there, the biggest difference is something as basic as [providing] large coverage area, very deterministic performance, and can do it with high security.”
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That means 5G is “relatively a new endeavor,” Shah said. “You are unencumbered by inertia and that legacy is true in public [cellular] network, so you should be able to take a few steps and quickly transition to 5G. So I think adoption will be very quick.”
Over the next 12 to 18 months, “I expect everyone outside of the US is, by definition, 5G,” Shah said of the company’s installed base. “In the US, I expect 50% to 60% of our installed base, maybe even higher, to be using 5G by this time next year.”
As a private company, Celona does not disclose its finances. However, Shah notes that the company has acquired 65 customers in two years. Mr. Shah said the company is “still in the log acquisition phase”, but “customers are starting to come to us” as word of mouth spreads about the company’s equipment.
“Celona has raised $100 million in three rounds and is currently not looking for additional funding,” Shah said.
