Five verticals that are exploring the use of CBRS

In its first seven months of full commercial deployment, most of the use of the shared Citizens Broadband Radio Service is being driven by two predictable use cases: Network capacity augmentation and fixed wireless broadband access, both on the networks of existing cellular operators and/or wireless ISPs. That’s not a surprise, as enterprises who would consider CBRS for private networks don’t have the same level of familiarity with operating cellular networks.

But enterprise use cases are being explored nonetheless, and CBRS start-up Celona is aiming squarely at bringing together what CTO Mehmet Yavuz calls “three DNAs”: enterprise IT, cellular and cloud, and making CBRS “consumable” for enterprise IT.

“Our opportunity here, really, is to bridge the gap between these three different worlds: Between the cloud, between the cellular telco industry and enterprise networking IT,” he said. Celona, which was founded in the spring of 2019 and raised $10 million in venture capital funding last fall, is in its pre-release/beta phase but has already been working with multiple customers to deploy CBRS networks.

Celona VP of Marketing Ozer Dondurmacioglu said that among the enterprise CBRS trials that Celona is supporting, there are a few common themes: The specific devices and/or applications that the businesses want to run on CBRS LTE are considered mission-critical. Some of them need to stay up 24/7. And all of them are enterprise-owned and staff-operated, whether they are remotely operated computer-vision cameras or devices carried by employees on-premise.

“Enterprises spent a lot of time and money purchasing, deploying, supporting, managing, training their staff on [these], and they want to run that stuff on relatively predictable, clean spectrum, which CBRS LTE promises them,” Dondurmacioglu said.

He described five verticals where Celona is supporting CBRS networks:

-Healthcare: “In healthcare, we’re seeing iPhones that are assigned to clinical staff running voice over IP applications, most likely tied to corporate PBX, as doctors and nurses are on the move,” said Dondurmacioglu. “These iPhones stay within the hospital … and they’re being used in that facility. Outdoor usage is increasing, based on the feedback that we’re hearing from them, because of the unfortunate covid situation, they are trying to serve their audiences in outdoor facilities as well.”

-Logistics: These are operations that need 24/7 network operations, Dondurmacioglu noted. “We’re all buying things online now and it’s becoming more and more important, and in order to meet those strict timelines that they have, they’re looking at a clean spectrum for staff-operated iPads, ruggedized tablets, and phones — again, enterprise-owned, staff operated.”

-Corporate enterprise: In this segment, he said, Celona is seeing “some traction toward employee devices being installed with physical SIM cards to enable private LTE” and has one customer going in that direction.  “It’s an interesting idea to have some of their employees running on CBRS LTE in case they focus on sensitive communications and they need high levels of predictable, measurable reliability on that link,” Dondurmacioglu said.

-Transportation: Another instance of a vertical that operates 24/7. Dondurmacioglu said that when it comes to specific connectivity needs such as cranes, which rely on various computers and sensors, “you either cable them or you try to run them on a public mobile network or on Wi-Fi or CBRS LTE. Some of them have been considering CBRS LTE” to keep control of their data and network and again, have access to spectrum where interference is not an issue.

Higher education: This is Celona’s leading segment, according to Dondurmacioglu, and the pandemic is driving networking changes as colleges and universities grapple with how to either re-open their campuses or support students and staff who are already on-campus for various reasons. Multiple universities are also qualified bidders in the ongoing CBRS Priority Access License auction.

“Higher education is evolving their needs. … They’re looking at outdoor classrooms, and they’re looking at additional wireless broadband for residence halls where the Ph.D. students and some of their researchers cannot leave the campus, they have to work within the campus. They are staying in residential halls, so they need that additional broadband.” For when students come back, Dondurmacioglu continued, some colleges and universities are “considering outdoor classrooms, weather-permitting, in outdoor areas where nobody used to do anything — like parking lots. You don’t usually think about covering a parking lot with solid wireless connectivity. Now they’re looking at CBRS as a backhaul for Wi-Fi hot spots to be able to do that.”

According to Celona, in a coverage-based network design with relatively low- to medium-density operations, one CBRS site can cover about a million square feet, compared to about 100,000 square feet for a general Wi-Fi outdoor AP. (The company offers a free online planning tool for CBRS networks so that companies can see how much spectrum is available in their area and how many access points would be needed for their network type and expected density of devices.) That significant difference in coverage, Yavuz explained, is a function of both the “ideal” nature of 3.5 GHz spectrum for enterprise use, the transmit power differences between CBRS and Wi-Fi, and the higher sensitivity levels of reception in LTE systems versus Wi-Fi, particularly on the uplink.

“3.5 [GHz] is really almost ideal for many use cases, because you don’t necessary want a low band, which is only for outdoor use,” he said. “Many use cases are local and indoors, or around a locality. But it’s also much better than 5 or 6 GHz in terms of the propagation characteristics. You don’t necessarily need miles and miles [of coverage], so that you have a lot of interference between the enterprises, but it’s good coverage for the needs of those parking lots or the transportation hubs and airports and so forth.”  

Join RCR Wireless News, Federated Wireless, WIA and Dell’Oro Group for a webinar on early lessons learned from CBRS, and keep an eye out for our accompanying editorial feature report.